ABSTRACT
The man’s death was, no doubt, a great misfortune. But as the response ofhis wife might suggest, there was also something quite funny, and even appropriate about it. The word ‘funny’ here is oddly ambiguous: how funny it is, after all, that a word (‘funny’) should mean both ‘amusing’ and ‘strange’. The peculiar appropriateness of the death of this Goodies fan consists not only in the fact that it was a particularly good episode of the popular 1970s British TV comedy programme (‘one of the best for a long time’), but also in the way it suggests a more general and perhaps more intimate link between laughter and death. When we say that someone ‘died laughing’ or ‘laughed themselves to death’ we are, in most circumstances, speaking metaphorically. What is funny (in both senses) about the case of the Goodies fan is that it involves a literalization of this metaphor. To take a metaphor literally (which can also be called ‘catachresis’ or ‘misapplication of a word’) is an example of a rhetorical device that is often very effective as a means of generating laughter. In this respect it would seem that the man’s death conforms to the conventions of comedy. But, of course, there is also a darker side to this, the side that involves ‘funny’ in the sense of ‘funny peculiar’. In other words, what this newspaper report also prompts us to ask is: why do we talk about ‘dying
with laughter’ or ‘laughing oneself to death’? Why do we talk about actors ‘corpsing’, in other words, of being unable to speak their lines because of a sudden fit of hysterical laughter? Are all these instances simply metaphorical? Is there something about laughter that, in a profound if ticklish way, puts it in touch with death? Let us leave these questions in suspense for a little while.
