Top 10 Real People Who Died Laughing

The literalness of the Killing Joke - as in the "Killer Joke" sketch from the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus - is a joke.

But death by laughter is a real thing.

Without further ado, and with fair warning, I present to your curiosity, abominable fascination, and potentially fatal mirth: the Top Ten individuals in history who died laughing.

10. Zeuxis

He was the greatest painter of his time (5th Century BC). Well, he had one rival, but we won’t go into that - ancient Greek art was a fiercely competitive endeavor.

Zeuxis, from Heraclea, was a master of realism. He painted frescoes and on wood panels - none of which have come down to us. By report, we know he advanced the technique of skiagrafia, light shading. Pliny the Elder said his grapes were so realistic that birds darted down to try to pluck them from the picture.

He was painstaking and uncompromising as an artist, my kind of guy.

When criticized for spending too much time on each piece, Plutarch has Zeuxis answering, “I admit I take a long time to paint; for I paint works to last a long time.”

Lest this seem ironic, considering none of his works are extant, at least they reached half a millennium beyond his time, to Pliny and Plutarch. Artistic longevity, if not immortality.

Along with his mastery of realism through light and shadow, Zeuxis is known to have innovated the composite method of composition: in order to paint Helen of Troy, he found the five most beautiful women in the city as models and combined their best features into a single ideal.

His expertise in ideal beauty is relevant to the story of his death.

A rich and presumptuous old woman, a would-be patron - pinched and ugly with vanity - approached the renowned painter with a commission to create the definitive portrait of Aphrodite. When, with clownish makeup and half-naked in her tasteless garb, she insisted on posing as the goddess herself, Zeuxis howled himself to the underworld.

Thus, the earliest account of someone dying laughing. Especially among painters, this instance of deadly risibility has been celebrated through the ages. For example, Rembrandt’s "Laughing" Self-Portrait (1668) is often understood as a portrayal of the artist as Zeuxis.

Another version of the story has Zeuxis actually executing the painting of the vain old woman. When he stepped back to survey his work, he began to giggle at the humor of his interpretation of Aphrodite and couldn’t stop. It was too much - his rendering of the goddess, or of Beauty or Art itself, as absurd.

9. Alex Mitchell

A bricklayer in King’s Lynn, England, Alex Mitchell liked to relax in front of the telly after a hard day’s work. The Goodies was on, a Monty Python-adjacent British comedy program.

It was March 24th, 1975 and Mitchell began to laugh during the episode titled, “Kung Fu Kapers” - a send-up of the martial arts craze in the seventies as it was in practice and in pop culture (with special reference to the American television series Kung Fu). It got to him. He choked and chortled for over 25 minutes as an aphoristic master of the ancient Lancastrian art of “Ecky Thump” slaughtered all comers with a blood pudding.

Finally, Mitchell keeled over on the sofa, dead. Later, his widow Nessie wrote The Goodies to thank them for making her husband’s last moments so full of merriment.

It wasn’t until 2012 when some insight came into what might have happened to him medically. His granddaughter, in surviving a heart attack as a young adult, was diagnosed with long QT syndrome - a hereditary condition associated with sudden arrhythmias that can result in cardiac arrest. It’s plausible Mitchell had the same condition and his long laughter triggered a disruption to the timing of his heartbeat.

8. Damnoen Saen-Um

In contrast to Alex Mitchell’s, this Thai ice-cream truck driver’s demise couldn’t have offered much solace to the spouse. No vicarious fun in witnessing the event, even in retrospect.

In 2003, Damnoen Saen-Um, from Muang district of Thailand’s Phrae province north of Bangkok, perished while laughing in his sleep.

Late night, his wife Luan heard him mumbling and then laughing - louder and louder, a terrible bellowing. In horror, she tried to wake him. To no avail. He stopped breathing. It was all over in two minutes.

In this case, there was an autopsy: heart attack, most likely. Yet, he was in good health, no history of cardiac issues, and drove his ice cream truck the day before without incident.

There’s a word for sleep-laughing: hypnogely

Related?: Luan had already been awakened moments before by a banging at their front door. She opened it and no one was there. It was when she returned that she found her husband stirring in his sleep and all the rest. According to the local newspaper, people in the couple’s neighborhood believed the devil came knocking at their door to take Damnoen, but - maybe some solace after all - he was a good man who led a good life so the devil permitted him to go in good cheer. If only his laughter hadn’t been so bellowing-hollow and creepy.

7. King Nanda Bayin

Nanda Bayin of the Toungoo Dynasty of Burma could not keep his father’s overextended empire together.

During his reign from 1581 to 1599, the largest empire in the history of Southeast Asia inexorably shrank - despite his every effort to quell revolt and prevent secession. He understood the demands, responsibilities, and burdens of kingship and confronted each crisis with strength and dynamism. Nevertheless, the empire disintegrated piece by piece. Nanda Bayin had inherited an untenable situation: the structural weakness of his father’s expansion by conquest made collapse inevitable. A magnificent failure, he lost his throne and was sent into exile at the palace where he was born in his home city of Toungoo.

Later that year, Nanda Bayin laughed to death when a visiting Italian Merchant explained to him that Venice was a free state with no need for a king.

6. Sir Thomas Urquhart

Exuberant and eccentric, Scottish artistocrat Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty pursued his wide variety of interests with vigor and, likely, tongue-in-cheek bombast. A bibliophile who put together a massive library, a prolific writer on multiple subjects, Urquhart (1611-1660) made himself at the same time either celebrated or ridiculed by his contemporaries as the kind of genius or charlatan - or trickster - who could create and promote a universal language centuries before Esperanto, trace his ancestry in direct named lineage to Adam and Eve, and innovate a trigonometry that mathematicians still find clever as far as the calculations go but impossible to work with due to his overindulgent use of neologisms and idiosyncratic mnemonics.

The excess and inventive flair of his writing served him best as the first English translator of Rabelais, whose verve he matches with his own Rabelaisian extravagance in extensions of synonymic interpretation, coinages, and misconstrued curlicues of denotation - all of which make for renderings as likely as not significantly longer than the original lines or passages.

Politically, he was a Royalist - a Cavalier - and knighted as a young man by Charles I for taking up arms, in Scotland in 1639, in support of the king during one of the earliest conflicts heading into the English Civil War. (It was a minor engagement remembered as “the Trot of Turriff”).

During Oliver Cromwell’s campaign to secure the newly established Commonwealth, the Scots took up the cause of Charles II and Urquhart participated in his ill-fated 1651 attempt of a Royalist capture of London. Charles II escaped abroad, but Urquhart - having earlier been declared a traitor by Parliament - was imprisoned in the Tower.

Cromwell later granted him clemency and released him on parole, but on the condition he forfeit all his estates and leave Britain. Urquhart lost all his manuscripts as well during, or on the way to, his imprisonment. In the end, he lost everything and lived out the rest of his days in Holland.

In 1660, it was reported to Sir Thomas Urquhart that the monarchy had been restored and Charles II had returned to England as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He died on the spot in a fit of hysterics.

5. King Martin of Aragon

Martin of Aragon (1356 -1410), although lauded as “the Humane,” was a notorious glutton. It wasn’t unusual for him to eat an entire goose himself.

Still, one day in 1410, after once again stuffing himself with goose flesh, he suffered an acute attack of indigestion. Maybe something about the spices used in this dinner’s preparation didn’t agree with him, maybe the meat was spoiled, or - maybe he was poisoned. He retired to his chamber with severe stomach pain and summoned his jester. Presumably, he wanted somebody to entertain him, take his mind off his heartburn and bloating.

The jester, named Borra, failed to make haste in attending his king. When Martin asked what took him so long, Borra replied, “I was out in the next vineyard, Your Grace, where I saw a young dear hanging by its tail from a tree branch. It was as if someone had punished him for stealing figs!”

The theme of figs, or figs with deer or figs with mules, or donkeys, as seen below in Chryssipus’ entry - whatever that assumed humorous juxtaposition of hoofed animals and figs - seems to figure saliently as an actual killing joke. There must be something inaccessible to us nowadays about figs as a delicacy inappropriate to ungulates.

A real-life avatar of the Jester archetype rears its head, with its joke, its killer joke. - channeled through relished figs, go figure.

For whatever reason, Martin found the idea or image so funny, so uncontrollably hilarious, that he guffawed for over three hours. His indigestion must’ve acted on his diaphragm so that he was unable to stop convulsing. Eventually, he fell out of bed, His Majesty - His Immensity - dead before he hit the floor.

4. Mrs. Fitzherbert

No first name here, but the “Mrs.” stands alone with surname as a title of English middle class distinction - like Dr. Johnson’s muse Mrs. Thrale, like the popular novelist Mrs. Gaskell, or like Queen Victoria herself implicated with her companion as “Mrs. Brown”- indicating a woman of married status or of independent means whether married, widowed, or single.

In Mrs. Fitzherbert’s case, she is identified as the widow of a Northhamptonshire clergyman. On the Wednesday evening of April 17th, 1782, she traveled with some friends to attend a performance of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London.

The popular actor Charles Bannister starred - in drag - as the pretty Polly Peachum, and when this jowly-cheeked middle-aged man’s man, with a show of ankle, made his entrance in wig and billowy dress, hairy forearms bulging as he waved a dainty fan next to his five-o’clock shadow, the audience roared. A showstopper. Eventually, everyone calmed down - but not Mrs. Fitzherbert. It was so bad, so embarassing and disruptive, she had to excuse herself and leave the theater before the close of the second act.

Out on the street, she couldn’t shake the preposterous display from her mind and laughed all the way back to the inn where she and her friends were staying. Her tittering continued without intermission throughout the next day and again over night, her imagination tickling her into Friday morning, April 19th - at which point Mrs. Fitzherbert collapsed.

3. Pietro Aretino

In 1556, robust poet, satirist, high art pornographer, and all around man of letters of the Italian Renaissance, Pietro Aretino died of asphyxiation from the constriction of laughing too much; or else, while listening to a dirty joke, he laughed so hard he fell backwards and broke his neck.

His death has been - as with Zeuxis’ - a subject of painting, perhaps for his being so close to the art world, not as a painter himself, but as a champion of great artists like Titian and Raphael, and as an early practitioner of art history and criticism as a discipline. Check out Anselm Feuerbach’s 1854 The Death of the Poet Pietro Aretino.

Why am I ranking Pietro Aretino in the Top 3?

“People say that I am the son of a courtesan; I am not unhappy with that; but I have the spirit of a king. I live free, I enjoy myself, and thus I may count myself a happy man." - Pietro Aretino

More for the congruence of his death with his personality, rather than the irony of it: he was raunchy and rambunctious, his excessiveness was that of repletion - joy and exuberance of body and spirit. Aretino had greatness; he was an original, and more substantial than Urquhart, less of a crank, rather a forthright, compelling public asserter of all he was and all he liked.

Husky, bearded, a man of huge appetites, and huge energy; exultant consumer of food, drink, words, art, people, and sex. Of humble origin, he proudly made his living by his pen, mostly through what amounted to blackmail: his wit utilized for praise and blame, his scathing, gossipy lampoons - widely read as news of the day - struck fear into the scheming hearts of the rich and powerful, and they’d pay him off, or he’d ask them to pay him off under threat of targeted publication. Thus, he received much of his income, and gifts of jewels and pearls. King Francis I of France appeased him with a golden chain. In gratitude for his editorial work on the final revision of Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto called him “divine” and gave him the sobriquet, Scourge of Princes. An offended bishop tried to have him assassinated. Morevoer, if he wasn’t acting as critic of nobility, often he’d find himself entrusted by the eminent as counselor, or “secretary” - understanding this role as “keeper of secrets” - which insurance he made sure to hold over the proper heads. An openly bisexual libertine, he compromised men and women alike with his love letters and their elicited responses. Lest some of this sound less than heroic, note that it was his avowed purpose to speak truth far and wide and revel in the actual, earthy ways of the world. Aretino achieved major success in his lifetime (and posthumous wholesale banning) in whatever genre of writing he tried his hand and his vernacular, inimitable, colorful style of poetry and prose was the pointed opposite of academic or highfalutin: his philosophical dialogues from the brothel skewered conventional high-minded Platonism; his ekphrastic Sonneti Lussuriosi, “Sonnets of Lust,” outdid the drawings they were based on with their obscene relish in fleshly, sensual delights, beside which vibrant licentiousness the spiritualized pure love of Petrarch could be despised as an outcome of celibate timidity; and he promoted his smash-hit comedies as feistily buffo boffo “anti-erudite,” featuring scandalous practical jokes in service of calling out the pretensions of society and the machinations of power. In full pressing of vitalic license, he proclaimed that in his art and actions he was following nature and wrote what he knew and what he lived.

In short, Pietro Aretino was a wild man.

& he died laughing at a bawdy story, told by his sister no less…

2. Chryssipus

Ancient Greek philospher Chryssipus lived to a ripe, revered age, the principal formalizer of Stoic doctrine. As a young man, he came to Athens dedicated to knowledge. By around 230 BC, he became the third head of the school and Stoicism’s foremost authority. With over 700 attributed works, Chryssipus was a master logician as well as a deep inquirer into epistemology and ethics, establishing virtue on the basis of universal nature. He was respected for his equitable judgment and moderate conduct, a good reflection of Stoic reasoning and self-discipline. He scrupulously presented each side of an argument, giving just accounts and citations of rival philosophers and schools of philosphy, and in that manner built up a fortified system capable of answering prevailing attacks in thought and offering a way of life designed to meet the vicissitudes of circumstance and fate with steadiness, harmony, and moderation.

All things in moderation - including moderation!

In the extent of his long and respectable life, during the 143rd Olympiad, ~ 205 BC, Chryssipus at the age of 73 enjoyed a feast, quaffed a quantity of wine barbarically unmixed with water, undiluted - if he was going to feast, he was going all in, hunger and thirst. In fact, he got drunk.

He admitted to feeling dizzy, sat aside, and in the slosh of inebriation, observed his donkey getting into a supply of figs. He watched the donkey eating the figs and chuckled at first to himself until he cried aloud - to all, and to his donkey - “Why don’t you wash those figs down with some undiluted wine!” and from there he started hooting so profoundly that he fell to the ground in paroxysms of glee, soon foaming at the mouth, unable to be revived.

Figs again, and an ungulate beast, and laughing at his own joke - like Zeuxis laughing at his own painting, which latter some say angered the gods, or at least Aphrodite, and thus his demise. There seems to be a presupposition of meanness in consideration of those who laugh at their own jokes, as with the Russian Trickster Raven named Kutikha as mentioned here: Activation of the Divine Fool Archetype

A drunk philosopher, a drunk Stoic, dies of a laughing fit in old age. Was the Stoic overcome or did the Stoic overcome Stoicism? Does life - through laughter unto death - overcome philosophy?

Chryssipus and the fig-eating donkey illustration by Giuseppi Porta (Salviati) in a 1606 publication of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers

and bringing mortal hilarity to its crowning glory

1. Ole Bentzen

It had to come back around, at least in part, to Monty Python. Please keep in mind, A Fish Called Wanda - and the scene in question - stars Michael Palin, who was Ernest Scribbler, writer of the original killer joke way back in that Flying Circus sketch. (The movie was written by John Cleese, who also stars with Palin, along with Kevin Kline and Jamie Lee Curtis).

In 1989, Ole Bentzen, a Danish audiologist, saw A Fish Called Wanda on the big screen. Not to get too into the plot (or too into my memory of comedic heist bungling), there comes a moment when Kline’s character is trying to make Palin, who is tied to a chair, talk. He swallows Palin’s precious fish out of an aquarium and stuffs french fries up his nose. By now you know how these things play out. Bentzen was literally rolling in the aisle. His relatives later drew attention to an incident at the family dinner table a few years before involving cauliflower up people’s noses - an explanation of the scene’s special resonance for him. He laughed uncontrollably until going into cardiac arrest. I don’t know how they figured this, but reports estimated his heart rate rose to 250-500 beats per minute before he expired.