Die Laughing

At least he got the last laugh.

"Stop that laughing! Have you forgotten what happened last time? If you don't stop this laughing, you're gonna end up dead just like your idiot hyena cousins!"

— Judge Doom, Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Sometimes when a character, especially a Sad Clown or Plucky Comic Relief type, is facing death, they find the whole experience laugh-out-loud funny. Or sometimes, the laughter itself is what kills them, especially if they've just been hit with Comedy as a Weapon. Either way, that's where this trope comes in. Can also overlap with Laughing Mad, especially if the character is a villain who plans on Taking You with Me. Laughter may be their way to Face Death with Dignity.

Compare Dying Smirk, Go Out with a Smile and Comfort the Dying. Contrast Laugh Themselves Sick, which doesn't (usually) involve any actual injury. Although a plausible reaction if played right, this trope is not to be confused with the Horror Comedy Tabletop RPG of the same name.

This is a death trope, so expect unmarked spoilers.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Alive: The Final Evolution, victims of the 'suicide virus' gleefully kill themselves, sometimes relenting long enough to do something important to them or encourage others to do the same. Those who are infected with the virus but have yet to succumb to it, and witness the suicides aren't sure whether to be terrified or be jealous.
• Devimon in Digimon Adventure, after mocking what he thought was Angemon's Senseless Sacrifice, manages one last Evil Laugh before he's gone.
• In the Dragon Ball Z OVA "Bardock, Father of Goku", Bardock goes out this way when he realizes the prophecy he had of a Saiyan vanquishing Frieza wasn't of him, but of his son, Goku.
• In Excel♡Saga, an unnamed old lady in episode 4 dies this way, sharing a laugh with Sumiyoshi before abruptly falling face down on the table.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Greed dies laughing maniacally while being rendered down to a Philosopher's Stone.
• Gundam: Although his face can't be seen because of his helmet, Mu La Flaga laughs during his Heroic Sacrifice at the end of Gundam SEED (although it turns out in Gundam SEED Destiny to have been a Disney Death).
• In Hellsing, the Captain dies laughing (which Seras described "like a child") when he is killed by Pip.
• In Naruto, Hidan dies laughing hard while the rocks are piling on top of him, out of conviction that he'll escape one day.
• One Piece: Sanji's brothers die laughing when Big Mom's crew has the Vinsmoke family - minus Sanji - helpless and is ready to kill them all. They all merely laugh in the face of their imminent demise. However, this lack of a fear of death isn't due to having no regrets in life, or courage, or even spite, but because their father had genetically engineered them to be physically incapable of it. The three are nonchalantly laughing at themselves for falling for Big Mom's treachery, and then laugh even harder at Judge for having a more human reaction to the situation.
  • This is also a trait of those with the 'D.' initial. Roger laughed like that at his execution, as did Luffy when Buggy was trying to execute him. Jaguar D. Saul also laughed when he died saving Robin. The only D. who displays fear in the face of death is Blackbeard (Marshall D. Teach).
  • Subverted as the brothers are not dead. They show up again a few chapters later.
• Pokémon: The Series: After Jessie ends up being incapable of restraining her amusement of Haunter's antics when the platform she and the rest of Team Rocket were on and lets go, Meowth comments while she is laughing that she's going to die laughing. Knowing these characters, they survive, albeit at the end of the episode, they are encased in cement.
• Rurouni Kenshin: When Shishio spontaneously combusts from his extreme body temperature, he dies, burning in flames, laughing to the end.
• Sword of the Stranger: Jogan and Balinbow are laughing maniacally while their mecha was exploding.
• Played for drama in Team Medical Dragon where a patient who is recovering from a bypass operation laughs too loud due to his granddaughter's antics, causing the stitches on his heart to burst. He doesn't survive the second operation.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann:
  • Jougan and Balinbow make a Heroic Sacrifice to save Gimmy and Darry, then they die laughing in the face of death... and take out an Anti-Spiral fleet with their death.
  • Kittan dies laughing about his new found Spiral power.
• "The Ghosts of Golden Time" from Voices in the Dark is about a pair of dreadfully unfunny comedians who somehow get their audiences to roll in the aisles with laughter. When challenged by competition or those who know their secret, they keep their victims laughing until they die.

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • Joker's venom is the villain's most iconic weapon, starting with the very first Batman vs. the Joker story. Without an anti-toxin to combat it, victims can die laughing with huge unnatural smiles on their faces.
  • The Joker himself, after being crippled by Batman in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, SNAPS HIS OWN NECK BY TWISTING IT AROUND to frame his nemesis, and then dies laughing.
  • A refined version of Joker venom causes victims to laugh up their own intestines.
• In an Archie story, Jughead is kidnapped in Mexico and Mr. Lodge is sent the ransom note. It's touch-and-go for a while, but Lodge pulls through.
• Secret Six: Dying with a laugh is done heartbreakingly in Villains United:
  Parademon: ...tell me a joke, clown.
  Ragdoll: Dear, loyal demon, I'm afraid you've misjudged me. I don't know any j...wait. You're dying alone in the mud without ever having had a name or a home.
  Parademon: HAHAHA! See? I told you you were funny...
• In Sin City, when Marv learns that his foe is Cardinal Roark, he realizes that it's going to kill him, whether he takes down Roark or not. Marv decides to press on: "Hell, dying will be nothing. I'll die laughing if I know I've done this one thing right." And so he does.
• In The Order of the Stick: On the Origin of PCs, the newly-formed Order's first battle against some enemy kobolds result in an Epic Fail due to some poorly thought-out readied actions that only kills a single kobold. But they still prevail, as Durkon notes, "On tha plus side, I think tha other kobolds died from laughter."

Fan Works

• In Arc Royale, Jaune Xiong goes out this way at Cinder's hands having hidden away the Fall Maiden from her as he explains his only desire was to screw over her plans for what his Cinder did to him. She can kill him, but he'll just go back to his world while she isn't going to get what she wants.
• Wiki Warrior: One of Taylor's random attacks curses an opponent with unstoppable laughter — but Taylor rolled a 1, so the curse is boosted to be permanent. Several days later, the victim commits suicide, and her body is still laughing weeks after that.

Films — Animated

• The Joker laughs hysterically when the title character of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm prevents his escaping a massive explosion. He survives thanks to Joker Immunity (as shown in The Batman and Robin Adventures Annual which shows how Joker survived his fiery death), but at the moment it didn't seem like he had any means to get out alive. That's because that one was Taking You with Me Comedic Sociopathy.
• In A Christmas Carol (2009), the Ghost of Christmas Present dies by dissolving into a skeleton as midnight strikes. He continues to laugh when he is a skeleton, but dies quickly after.
• Disney Animated Canon:
  • An alternative ending of The Lion King plays it straight with Scar.
  • As well as an alternate ending of Beauty and the Beast with Gaston.
• In Quest for Camelot, Ruber cackles madly as he is obliterated by accidentally stabbing Excalibur, which is merged with his arm, back into its stone.
• In Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, this is the fate of anything that breathes in the gas in the Chasm of Death, though the furry heroes are saved by Ellie before this can happen to them.
  Ellie: They're just laughing. What's so bad about that?
  Buck: (pointing at dinosaur skeletons) They died laughing!

Films — Live-Action

• The Ace of Hearts: Farallone is part of a terrorist group, which has decided to kill Forrest and Lilith, defectors from the group. Farallone, determined to save Lilith, sneaks a bomb into his lap and activates it. While the bomb is ticking down the men of the brotherhood draw cards to see who will kill Forrest and Lilith. Farallone gets the job. He bursts out laughing, and he's still cackling with glee when the bomb goes off and kills all of them.
• Batman (1989):
  • Exposure to the Joker's Smilex nerve gas causes the victim to go into spasms of uncontrollable laughter, before dying minutes later with an extra large Joker-esque 'smile' on their face. This only applies when the poison is absorbed through tampered cosmetic chemicals. The people at the art museum and the parade died in agony.
  • The creepy grin frozen on the Joker's face when he shatters all his bones on the pavement of Gotham, with an unnervingly funny laugh from a Laughing-Bag found by Commissioner Gordon on his corpse: the laugh is just a looped recording playing over a tiny speaker. (In an early draft of the script, his unnaturally frozen smile goes away as he dies.)
• Black Panther has fugitive arms dealer Ulysses Klaue betrayed and fatally shot by his partner in crime Erik Stevens, who reveals himself to be a Wakandan. Klaue, ever the Giggling Villain, dies chortling over his own mistake.
  Klaue: Ah, and to think I saw you as some crazy American...
• In The Core, Zimsky spends his final moments recording his Last Words into a dictaphone. When he realises no-one will ever hear them, he cuts himself off with a bemused "What the fuck am I doing?" and instead just starts laughing hysterically. He's still laughing when the nuclear bomb he's trapped with detonates, vaporising him and the dictaphone.
• In The Death of Stalin, Joseph Stalin himself laughs heartily at a note accusing him of terrible crimes, then suddenly keels over of a stroke.
• The Joker in The Dark Knight laughs hysterically all the way down his seemingly fatal plunge off the skyscraper and would have died that way if Batman hadn't saved him. He's rather put out when Batman does so, as his laughter was in part because it looked like he finally made Batman break his one rule and so he would have been victorious in death.
• In Doctor Sleep, Snakebite Andi cackles psychotically after forcing Billy to kill himself while she disintegrates to death.
• Donnie Darko dies at the end while laughing hysterically, presumably out of relief that he has fulfilled his role as the Living Receiver.
• The Shaw Brothers war film Heroes of the Underground ends with the protagonist, Ding, laughing as he deliberately detonates the dynamites in a booby-trapped cavern, killing himself and the main villain at the same time.
• In The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, President Snow laughs after Katniss fatally shoots President Coin. He's beaten to death by the district residents afterwards.
• Independence Day has Russell Casse grinning and cackling like a loon as he flies his fighter in a kamikaze attack to take out the alien superweapon in a heroic sacrifice.
  Russell Casse: Hello, boys! I'm BAAAAACK!
• Kingsman: The Golden Circle: After Eggsy and Harry kill Poppy Adams by drugging her with her own heroin, she laughs maniacally as she falls over and dies, moments after telling them the code to release the antidote. This serves to highlight her psychotic nature.
• Jack Vincennes does this in L.A. Confidential, after using his carefully chosen last words to set up a trap for the man who killed him.
• Laughter in Paradise opens with notorious practical joker Henry Russell on his deathbed. He stages one last practical joke—setting fire to his nurse's newspaper while she is reading it—starts laughing and then keels over.
• In Mary Poppins, the grumpy old banker Mr. Dawes Sr. dies laughing when he finally gets Mr. Banks' joke.
• In Predator, the mortally wounded alien, rather than die from bleeding out, sets a suicide bomb and begins laughing maniacally.
• In The Princess Bride, Vizzini drinks poisoned wine and then laughs maniacally, thinking he'd outsmarted Westley. He literally keels over mid-laugh.
• Laughing Gas was used as a weapon in The Radioland Murders.
• John Geiger laughs after his plane crashes onto an oil tanker before exploding in the climax of Speed 2: Cruise Control.
• El Guapo in the ¡Three Amigos!; after being tricked by the locals and fatally injured, he takes advantage of the heroes' nonchalance and shoots one of them in the foot. "That was a good trick too. Hahaha....."
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: All but one of the weasels die laughing and become ghosts, just like Judge Doom warned them they would. (It is implied that this was a family ailment, as it also happened to their "idiot cousins", as Doom described them, although this is inaccurate, as weasels and hyenas in real life are unrelated due to being in different animal families.)
  Smart Ass: Stop that laughin'! You know what happens when you can't stop laughin'?! [hits Psycho and Greasy with a plunger and then throws it at Stupid] One of these days, you're gonna die laughin'.
  • And of course, one final warning by Judge Doom, which itself inspires the method Eddie uses to finish the weasels off:
    Judge Doom: ONE OF THESE DAYS, YOU IDIOTS ARE GONNA LAUGH YOURSELVES TO DEATH!

Literature

• At the end of the first chapter of Brothers of the Snake, one of the dark eldar raiders killed by Priad and Antoni on Baal Solock has the last laugh after realising that the plan to lure a WAAAGH! using an Ork relic will succeed, despite the entire raiding party being wiped out.
• In the backstory of The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, the comedian Ah Hoon was found murdered, with a laugh frozen on his face. As we find out at the very end, this was due to the great difficulty the killer had in reaching Ah Hoon: The killer looked ridiculous at the moment of the murder.
• The Dark Tower:
  • Cuthbert and Roland, the last gunslingers of Gilead, are pulling a Self-Destructive Charge to take out as many of the enemy as possible. Cuthbert loses first one eye, then the other, to enemy projectiles. And he still keeps laughing, right up to the moment he falls.
  • A shapeshifting emotion vampire tries to kill Roland this way in the final novel. It's mentioned that this was a particularly effective method as Roland is normally rather humorless.
• Garrett, P.I.: Near the end of Cold Copper Tears, Morley throws a stolen potion at one of the armored attackers. After a moment's exposure, the attacker starts laughing too much to fight; Crask takes the opportunity to kill him, only to start giggling himself from secondary exposure to the potion.
• Harry Potter:
  • Sirius Black gets offed mid-laugh. His cousin and murderer, Bellatrix Lestrange, cops it exactly the same way from Molly Weasley.
  • Fred Weasley dies as he's laughing at a joke made by Percy, who up to this point has displayed No Sense of Humor.
• In Holes, Katherine "Kissin' Kate" Barlow was found by her old enemy Charles "Trout" Walker, who had become destitute when a drought gripped the lake town his family owned. He and his wife Linda try to torture Kate for information on where she hid her loot, as she'd robbed several banks during her tenure as an outlaw and they're very desperate. Before they can do anything to her, however, a Yellow Spotted Lizard bites her on the ankle, which is an automatic death sentence. As "there was nothing more they could do to her now", Trout and Linda demand the answer before she dies and Kate simply tells them to "start digging" and dies laughing at them.
• Hobson's Island has a pack of bio-weapon monkeys brought to the island that do this to people who touch them. Everyone on the island falls victim to them. Only one guy survives. He goes insane, as it happened it the middle of his comedy show and he believes that he is responsible.
• In The Hunger Games President Snow dies laughing after Katniss shoots Coin, having believed what he told her about Coin dropping the bombs that killed her little sister, Prim.
• Prak, near the end of Life, the Universe and Everything, tells "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" about the entire universe, and drives everyone who hears it mad. Prak himself dies after several days of uncontrollable laughter upon meeting Arthur Dent: he apparently found the "truth" about Arthur fatally hilarious.
• The Long Ships: Styrbjörn is killed at Uppsala by a spear through the neck just when he is laughing at the approaching Swedish army.
• The werewolf Gmork in The Neverending Story is starving to death. Atreyu finds him and the two have a long winding conversation, neither realizing that they should be trying to kill each other. When Atreyu tells Gmork who he is, the werewolf laughs hauntingly and dies.
• In Oliver and the Seawigs, the Thurlstone gets tickled from the inside, causing him to laugh so hard his body crumbles.
• Cornell Woolrich's story "The Screaming Laugh" has this. Turns out you can kill someone by Tickle Torture.
• In one of Cordwainer Smith's novels, at the age of 16 children are tested. If they pass, they are free to live out their lives. If they fail, they can be "regressed", apparently physically as well as mentally, up to three times, at the discretion of the testers. Individuals who fail the test and the testers decline to regress, or who fail for the fourth time, are sent into a room with other failed individuals where they laugh themselves to death.
• Overlapping with Laughing Mad: Thot Trom in the Star Trek Novel 'Verse. After learning that his peoples' plans across several novels form a Stable Time Loop, that his superiors' attempted recovery of a crashed Alternate Universe starship from Tirana III in Star Trek: Cold Equations - the failure of which led to his penetration of the alternate universe in Star Trek: Section 31 - Disavowed - was an effort to salvage a ship he would actually crash there himself, Trom is reduced to laughing madly as he plunges toward the planet.
• In The Underland Chronicles, a certain type of carnivorous plant in the Vineyard of Eyes emits a euphoric gas that makes you laugh at everything, rendering you helpless to the attacking vines.
• In "You Don't Have to Be Mad...", a short story from the Diogenes Club series by Kim Newman, Richard Jeperson investigates a clinic run by Dr. I. M. Ballance which is turning people into functioning psychopaths (some of whom are implied to be infamous politicians and entrepreneurs of The '80s). The story opens with a government bureaucrat laughing as he does things like chopping down a preserved tree for a highway or firing employees. Finally he tries to assassinate a troublesome journalist, only to fail because he's laughing so much, he gives himself a seizure.

Live-Action TV

• In 1000 Ways to Die, a man dies this way after several HOURS of nonstop laughter. It turns out, after you have been laughing nonstop for about 20 minutes, you literally cannot stop laughing. Eventually, he dies of a heart attack.
• The Cowboy Android in the self-titled episode of The Aquabats! Super Show!.
• Better Call Saul has Lalo Salamanca going out in this fashion, probably because he was amused by Gus Fring's literal shot in the dark.
• The Goodies.
  • This is the fate of anyone who sees Bigfoot (Tim Brooke-Taylor with a foot that's swelled up to enormous size). Even the man putting up the "Wanted!" Poster dies laughing at the sight of it.
  • Or at least one person who saw "Kung Fu Kapers" (see Real Life).
• In Episode 5 of Loki (2021), Classic Loki, having exhausted all his power trying to help Loki and Sylvie, bellows out a loud, defiant laugh moments before he gets devoured by Alioth.
• In the Season 3 finale of Lucifer (2016), Cain gives this as he is killed by Lucifer after seeing his devil face return, meaning he has become as bad as him.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Peckster was a Monster of the Week that could easily be taken as a nightmarish Woody Woodpecker. He spends the entirety of his fight laughing like mad, so of course he gives one last laugh when the Megazord finishes him off.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: This is the fate of whoever reads or hears the Funniest Joke In The World, so lethal that it was translated into German and used as a weapon in World War II.
• Akumaro in Samurai Sentai Shinkenger. As he was already a Hell Seeker, his reaction to being vertically bisected by a skyscraper-sized BFS is to laugh with delight at the pain.
• The Body-Of-The-Week in one episode of Six Feet Under is a teenage girl who dies laughing. She and her friends have a slumber party and play a phone prank. They're laughing about it when the girl falls backwards off the bed and hits the floor head-first, dying instantly. Rico, the restorative artist, can't get the goofy grin off her face, and he scoffs: "I wish I knew what the fuck was so funny."
• In Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Solonius dies laughing after Spartacus, just before giving him the final stroke, confides in him that he plans to kill Solonius's enemy Batiatus as well later on.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: "Plato's Stepchildren" has the crew captured by the usual omnipotent aliens, who try to break their wills by telepathically forcing them through various humiliating actions. This includes making Spock laugh, which McCoy says will kill him if it goes on too long.

Music

• This was the fate of "Ali Baba's Camel" in a 1931 novelty song covered by The Bonzo Dog Band.

Pinball

• Subverted in Metallica — Sparky is grinning as he's strapped into the electric chair, but he doesn't die from being electrocuted.

Poetry

• "Krákumál": As Ragnar Lodbrok dies in a snake pit, he drives home that he has no need to feel sorry for his death, because he has lived a glorious life, and will be feasted in Odin's hall in the afterlife. In the very last line, he tops his death-defiance off by asserting that he will die laughing.
  On the high bench, boldly,
  beer I'll drink with the Gods;
  hope of life is lost now—
  laughing shall I die!

Theater

• In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Big Daddy explains to his son Brick that he wants to leave behind all of his riches to him and the rest of the family because his own father was a worthless old hobo. His only tie to glory was a worthless old uniform from his time served in the Military which he gave to Big Daddy, but despite his terrible situation he died laughing with his son by his side. Brick thinks that he died laughing the way he did because he was happy that he had his son by his side, and that he left behind many happy memories and love for his son the best way he knew how, Big Daddy is deeply moved by this perspective.
• In Little Shop of Horrors, Orin the dentist goes out laughing by accidentally asphyxiating himself with nitrous oxide.

Video Games

• In Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham Origins the Joker's toxin causes this to happen.
  • Speaking of which, at the end of Batman: Arkham City an incredibly dark and twisted version happens when The Joker dies. Batman tells the Joker that if he hadn't stabbed him in the arm, causing him to drop the Titan antidote, he would have given it to him and saved his life. To which the Joker starts laughing hysterically while coughing uncontrollably and admits that it's Actually Pretty Funny. He then dies with an enormous smile on his face.
• An event in Crusader Kings III has your jester offer to tell a joke that has a 1% chance of causing your ruler to die from laughter.
• Darkest Dungeon: The Ancestor implies this about the Jester whenever you recruit one.
  Ancestor: He will be laughing still, at the end.
• Completing Real Bout Fatal Fury as either of the Bogard brothers (Terry or Andy) has them inadvertently knock Geese Howard off the balcony of his tower. He refuses their attempt to Save the Villain and goes out laughing in their face as he plummets towards the pavement.
• Suprisingly, Kefka Palazzo of Final Fantasy VI didn't do this, instead dying in complete silence.^note Probably the closest he can go to undergoing the trope is if the player is lucky enough to kill him either immediately after he starts charging Goner/Forsaken, since that's when his head with his laughing expression is displayed, or when the fourth stanza of Dancing Mad starts to loop. He did go out this way in Dissidia Final Fantasy, though with a sad laugh rather than his trademark roaring cackle. Terra is even prompted to express some Sympathy for the Devil after his last sobbing laugh has faded.
  • Gestahl does, however, refer to the trope when Kefka starts laughing for no apparent reason when Gestahl attempts to kill him to prevent him from having the Warring Triad unleash their true power and cause the apocalypse. Subverted in that his spells have absolutely no effect on Kefka due to being in the Warring Triad's energy field. It's even given a Continuity Nod in Dissidia Duodecim Final Fantasy, from Sephiroth says the trope name word for word when about to fight Kefka.
    Final Fantasy VI:
    Gestahl: No hard feelings, now... I'm just going to use this power you've unleashed to put you to sleep.
    [Kefka starts laughing]
    Gestahl: What's so funny!? Very well... I suppose it's only fitting that you go out laughing.
    Dissidia 012:
    Sephiroth: [to Kefka] Die laughing.
• Hidden Dragon: Legend have the Dark Raven, who laughs all the way as a giant piece of debris squashes him like a bug.
• Another Joker example is in Injustice: Gods Among Us, where an alternate universe version of the Joker dies laughing as he gets exactly what he wanted.
• Boc in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II is already a loony who laughs all the time, so it's only fitting that he'll keep on laughing until he chokes when you strike him down.
• In one of the cut endings of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, this is how Atton dies, after fighting a futile battle against Darth Sion. The audio still exists in the game file, and it may be... worth listening to.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, while Ghirahim is violently converted back to his master Demise's sword, he laughs maniacally, then falls limp when Demise pulls his sword out of Ghirahim's body. It's debatable whether this is an actual "death", but it meets most qualifications.
  • His master, Demise, also laughed as he disappears as he cursed Link and Zelda that his incarnation of his hatred return and cause problems in the future
• Neverwinter Nights: The Manic Psychotic voiceset, who's already Laughing Mad as it is. Surprisingly enough, it takes the usually hilariously hammy screaming into slightly creepy territory.
• Onimusha 3: Demon Siege: Gargant the Genma General is killed by Samanosuke in the intro video. He laughs as he explodes in light.
• In Persona 3, Shuji Ikutsuki keeps laughing as he bleeds out from a bullet to the gut, and even manages to croak out one final chuckle before toppling off the edge of the Gekkoukan High observatory.
• The way to deal with the final boss in Quest for Glory IV — tell him The Ultimate Joke and knock him off the ledge with rock/dagger/spell while he is laughing.
• Samurai: Way of the Warrior have the villain Orochi who laughs maniacally as he plummets down a shaft to his death... probably because he managed to drag you down in a Taking You with Me moment.
• Silent Hill 4: Jasper laughing hysterically as he burns alive, glad to have met "the Devil", followed by carving 17/21 into his own chest with a candlestick right before he dies.
• One of the various ways to die in The Sims 4 is for your Sim to become too playful, an emotional state called, "hysterical." If they don't calm down fast, they will die laughing.
• Tales of Symphonia: Zelos, if you kill him. When you strike the final blow in the boss battle, he laughs and keeps chuckling all through his dying cutscene. Considering he's a Death Seeker, it makes a lot of horrible sense.
• In Undertale, Toriel dies this way if you either are leveled up enough to One-Hit Kill her in a Genocide Route or pull an I Surrender, Suckers on any route after refusing to attack her, then attack her during her Moment of Weakness.
• ULTRAKILL: After defeating the Prime Soul of King Sisyphus, he claims that his rebellion against the forces of Heaven, and his entire existence, were nothing but a pointless struggle... But he doesn't regret a second of it. Then he lets out a menacing laugh of pride before his soul explodes into light.
• Sebastian LaCroix in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines dies laughing in the Anarch and Independent endings if you hand him the sarcophagus key. The absurdity of the situation and the last-minute knowledge that he's been the Unwitting Pawn probably had something to do with it. To clarify, he dies laughing because he thought the sarcophagus had the corpse of an ancient vampire in it whose powers he could then steal, but it turns out that instead it's been rigged with explosives. Explosives that are about to go off in his face.

Visual Novels

• In Dies Irae at the end of Marie's route Reinhard starts to laugh as the Bois de Justice is digging itself into his neck, content over the battle he just had and having been completely blindsided by his great granddaughter Rea.
• Tony Redwood's final moments in Policenauts, when he decides to throw himself off the stairway to his death.
• Super Danganronpa Another 2: According to Monocrow, Kanade Otonokoji died laughing as she was hanged to death seconds after witnessing her twin sister, overcome with despair, get decapitated due to falling for the Hope Spot trap.
• Higurashi: When They Cry: Rena dies laughing in the Big Bad's face during the climax of the penultimate arc.
• In Umineko: When They Cry EP 4, during "The Sweet World of Witches" segment, Rosa has been reduced to Laughing Mad as MARIA repeatedly kills her.

Web Animation

• 50 Ways to Die in Minecraft:
  • An entirely blue player with an LOL emoji for a face always seems to suffer this fate after something funny happens. In earlier videos this was accompanied by bouncing around.
  • jayRiott suffers a horrifyingly realistic instance of this in a deleted death. When he wishes for the Genie to make him the funniest man on the internet, he slowly makes a hilarious (in his own way) sentence… that slowly devolves into manic laughter. One can even hear poor Jake trying to gasp for air as the screen gets greyer and the laughter becomes more desperate. Jake Eyes scrapped this death for being way more dark than he expected (as well as the likelihood of thousands of comments telling him that the joke wasn't that funny).
• DEATH BATTLE!
  • Needles Kane AKA Sweet Tooth falls victim to the Joker Venom. He tries to strangle The Joker, but the venom claims his life before that can happen and he dies from over-laughing.
  • Goku Black chops Reverse Flash's past self in half while he's laughing at how his present self just blew up Black's own past self. As both of them are living paradoxes, this doesn't actually Ret-Gone either of them, and in fact they go on to murder even more past versions of each other.
  • Discord is killed while laughing, as it's revealed that, knowing of his incoming demise, he pulled one over on Bill Cipher by trapping them both back in the Nightmare Realm, and thus saving Equestria and ending Weirdmageddon, turning Bill's victory over Discord into a pyrrhic one. For an added bonus, Discord will likely even come back to life after a time as it's implied he can never truly be killed as long as chaos exists, making even that meaningless.
• Nutty from Happy Tree Friends usually laughs insanely as he dies.
• In Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged, Biggs gives Cloud a message for Jessie (he thought her voice was hot because it sounded like she was blowing him), which he gives her; she does this when she hears it (she found it funny that he thought his dick was that big). Cloud laughs along with her, only to realize that she's gone before long.
  • This is how Hojo goes out after Vincent sics Chaos on him in his Helletic form, dying the way he lived: an abominable mad man.
• The Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures episode "Chris's Airline Adventure Part 2", Gavin laughs so long and hard at Chris's wildly ludicrous airplane story that he dies from the lack of oxygen, with the newspaper headline "Gavin Free dies of laughter".

Webcomics

• The Nepenthes Dulcis found in Girl Genius incapacitates prey by inducing feelings of extreme happiness, letting it eat them while they're laughing all the way.
• In Erfworld, Lady Sylvia Lazarus laughs as she burns to death.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-3078 ("Cognitohazardous Shitpost") was a meme that originally featured the text "when you inhale the devils mary jane smoke" followed by a cartoon depiction of an Oh, Crap! face. Viewing the image caused viewers (but not its creator) to laugh uncontrollably and die. Not only that, but their corpses would continue laughing. The Foundation managed to neutralize it within one day, but not before over 3,500 viewers had died.
• This fandub of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has Dharkon laugh as he crashes into the ocean during the Restoration ending, content that Galeem died alongside him.
• During Critical Role's second campaign, appropriately, this is the fate of The Laughing Hand, combined with Died Standing Up when Caleb burns it to death.
• The Warp Zone: In "The Sims 4 in Real Life", Ryan dies laughing after Schroeder pisses his pants.

Western Animation

• The Batman: As in the comic, the Joker's gas causes its victims to die from uncontrolled laughter. Unlike in Batman: The Animated Series, they really were implied to be dead, not just unconscious. Wrath and Scorn even suffer Death by Secret Identity by Joker gas.
• Joker venom is non-fatal in Batman: The Animated Series^*The creators of the series used The Joker's Laughing Gas a lot, explaining they had to fall back on something since the censors wouldn't let him shoot anyone. When they saw how the gas instead either left the victims frozen in place or laughing non-stop with their faces twisted into sick, frightening grins, they admitted, "Yeah, that's actually worse.", but in both Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and the Superman: The Animated Series three-parter "World's Finest", the Joker finds his own supposedly certain death to be uproariously funny. Ironically, he doesn't laugh at all when he met his true end in the flashback in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, leading to his last words:
  That's not funny. That's not...
• In the Looney Tunes compilation movie Daffy Duck's Quackbusters, Daffy Duck goes on a quest to become a dying millionaire's companion. He winds up the millionaire's jester, and the millionaire winds up laughing uproariously as he pelts Daffy with pies, right up to his death.
  • That was the short subject "Daffy Dilly," with Daffy lamenting "It's a living" as the cartoon irises out. As Quackbusters reimagines the ending, Daffy becomes an heir to the late millionaire's fortune. He uses the money to open his ghostbusting business.
• "Die Laughing" was the title of a Danger Mouse episode. In it, Baron Greenback sends the leaders of the world into fits of laughter with a gas treated with a laugh-inducing micro-organism.
• In the South Park episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die", Kenny laughed himself to death after seeing Cartman's video. Kenny's spirit came out of his body, still laughing.
• The Tex Avery short "Symphony in Slang" starts with a slang-heavy hipster meeting Noah Webster at Heaven's pearly gates. With many a Visual Pun used to demonstrate his story, the hipster is revealed to have literally died from laughter.
• In The Venture Bros. episode "A Party For Tarzan", Henchman 21 recalls when a previous archenemy of The Monarch suddenly died of happiness right in front of him. 21 also mentions that this also happened to two teenagers, who also died of "happiness" after they managed to get a high score on an arcade game.
• The Simpsons: season 20 episode 20, Marge tells tales focused on women — one of these is "Macbeth". In this parody, Homer kills everybody at Marge's request so he can be the lead actor in a play. The way he kills Dr. Hibbert is, fittingly enough, by causing him to laugh to death after suffocating his room with laughing gas.
  Homer: "He who laughs last, laughs dead".
• Inversion: the laughter in the Popeye cartoon "It Hurts Only When They Laughs" was initiated by Olive, who makes Popeye and Brutus laugh while she's doing the dishes. Had either of them died, it wouldn't have been from laughing but from the fact they were beating the hell out of each other doing so.

Real Life

• Alex Mitchell found The Goodies episode "Kung Fu Kapers" so funny he laughed non-stop for 25 minutes straight. The strain on his heart was such that he suffered a fatal heart attack.^note It was later found that he most likely had an undiagnosed heart disorder that the exertion of laughing had aggravated after his granddaughter was diagnosed with the same disorder many years later His widow sent the Goodies a letter thanking them for making his last moments so happy.
• Robert Asprin died on May 22, 2008, of heart failure at his home in New Orleans. He was found lying on a sofa with a Terry Pratchett novel (Discworld) still open in his hands.
• Somebody literally died laughing while watching the scene in A Fish Called Wanda where Kevin Kline puts chips up Michael Palin's nose.
• The Greek philosopher Chrysippus is said to have died laughing when he gave his donkey wine and then watched it drunkenly attempt to eat figs, with the catalyst for the laughter being a joke he told about what he saw. Doubles as Death by Irony, as the philosophy school he belonged to was Stoicism.
• Francisco de Carvajal, a conquistador who revolted against the Spanish Empire before Lope de Aguirre did, was reportedly executed while mocking the entire event.
• This was likely Abraham Lincoln's fate, as John Wilkes Booth waited until the audience was distracted laughing loudly — Lincoln likely included, as he was said to have been enjoying the performance — before he fired the fatal shot.
• Legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker died young, suffering from a lot of health issues, which led to him dying laughing while watching a juggling act on television.
• Not a death, but a very close call: during Robin Williams' appearance on Inside The Actors' Studio, paramedics had to be called when an audience member got a hernia from laughing so hard.

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