Death from laughter refers to a rare instance of death, usually resulting from cardiac arrest or asphyxiation, caused by a fit of laughter. Instances of death by laughter have been recorded from Ancient Greece to the modern day. The first recorded use of the alternative term fatal hilarity is from 1956
Read more about Death From Laughter: Pathophysiology, Historical Deaths Attributed To Laughter, Modern Deaths Attributed To Laughter, Fictional Deaths Attributed To Laughter
Famous quotes containing the words death and/or laughter:
“I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him meerly seise me, and onely declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwrack, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotencie might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing laughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name.”
—Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 5, Yale University Press (1961)