Laughter is generally beneficial for your health, promoting stress reduction, improving your mood, and boosting your immune system.
In describing how hard someone laughed you may have heard the phrase, "He was dying from laughter." It's often used hyperbolically but what if there was some disturbing truth behind that phrase.
The fact is you can die from laughing. Death from laughter is a rare form of death, usually resulting from either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation, that has itself been caused by a fit of laughter. Dying from laughter has been recorded in ancient Greece right through modern times.
Three Recorded Examples...
Chrysippus, also known as "the man who died from his own joke," was a 3rd-century Greek philosopher who reportedly died of laughter after he saw a donkey eating his fermented figs; he told a slave to give the donkey undiluted wine to wash them down, and then, "having laughed too much, he died," according to Diogenes Laertius a local scribe.
Ole Bentzen was a Danish audiologist who found a scene in the movie A Fish Called Wanda so sidesplittingly funny that his heart rate rose to an estimated 250-500 beats per minute, leading to a heart attack as he laughed his way into the afterlife.
Alex Mitchell, from King's Lynn, England, died on March 24, 1975, laughing while watching the "Kung Fu Kapers" episode of The Goodies. After 25 minutes of continuous laughter, Mitchel slumped on the sofa and died from heart failure.
Three examples In Fiction...
"The Three Infernal Jokes," short story in The Last Book of Wonder (1916) by Lord Dunsany, is about three jokes "which shall make all who hear them simply die of laughter."
"The Stand In," was an episode of the American comedy Seinfeld, which featured Jerry Seinfeld telling a joke to a hospital patient who then suddenly dies from laughter.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a 1988 fantasy comedy, had a scene where the weasels of the Toon Patrol literally die laughing.
So now that we have determined laughter is not always a good thing in large doses, we can take the necessary precautions although I don't know what that would entail. Stop laughing? I don't think so. Check with your doctor before going to see a comedy? Not practical.
As it Stands, when you think about it dying from laughter may not be such a bad way to exit this life. I can certainly think of worse ways.
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