Dear Reader, reading this blog post could be very dangerous. Please proceed with caution.
There’s a Monty Python skitcalled The Funniest Joke in the World where a British writer during WWII comes up with a joke so funny it causes people to die laughing. No one can read it and live. Eventually the lethal joke gets translated into (nonsensical) German as:
Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?
Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
We see two German soldiers keel over laughing, and the “joke warfare” continues to cut its deadly swath.
Here’s where we enter treacherous waters. Because I know of two instances in history of people who may actually have died laughing–and I’m going to tell you the jokes that killed them. So continue reading at your peril.
Chrysippus
Are you brave enough to keep reading? All right, here’s the first one, as recounted by the Ancient Greek chronicler, Diogenes Laërtius: In about 204 BC, the Greek philosopher Chrysippus watched a donkey eat some figs. He cried out: “Now give the donkey a drink of pure wine to wash down the figs!!!”
Ba-dum-BUM!
That was the joke.
He evidently thought his own joke was so hilarious, he promptly had a fit of laughing that killed him. Are you still alive? Good. Phew. I think what saved you is the fact that jokes are very hard to translate, despite the “success” of the translated killer joke in the Monty Python skit. Chrysippus’s hilariously lethal joke was translated from Greek, so it was probably way funnier in the original. Or perhaps, as they say, “you had to be there.”
Martin the Humane
Still with me? Ready for the second one?
In 1410, Martin the Humane, king of Aragon and Sicily, asked his jester, Borra, where he’d been. Borra replied that he’d been in the next vineyard, where he’d seen a deer hanging from a tree by its tail. Borra surmised that someone had punished the deer for stealing figs.
*cricket chirp*
That was the second joke. Martin was supposed to have died laughing after hearing that someone had hung a deer by its tail. It didn’t help that he was suffering from indigestion after eating an entire goose.
Well, now that you know two real-life, actual killer jokes, I hope you will use this powerful knowledge judiciously and responsibly. At the very least, don’t tell Martin the Humane’s joke at Thanksgiving dinner, especially if they’ve served goose. You could have serious carnage on your conscience.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_VII#Chrysippus (see 185)
John Doran, The History of Court Fools (Boston: Francis A. Niccolls & Co., 1858), 377-378.
http://www.medievalists.net/2014/05/14/top-10-strangest-deaths-middle-ages/