Actually, quite a few. And in this week of the Feast of All Souls and Mexico's
Day of the Dead, it is a good time to present my neology.
Most of us sweat and tire and sicken; we die by inches. But not all of us.
Some of us depart this mortal coil in ways that excite the imagination or strain
credulity. And some definitely tickle the funny bone.
Perhaps if the weird science of cloning continues apace, dying will be cheapened
enough that much more of it will be funny. Until that time, we need keep a sharp
eye for the sharp axe of absurdity to preserve mortality's humor. What follows
are some dearly departed who left behind the legacy of one last laugh as they
entered the land of the gods.
If sacred writings are any guide, the gods seem to have no need of laughter.
But this doesn't mean they have no sense of humor. Take the case a few years
ago of the holiday boaters. Some lightning cracked on the horizon, and one beery
comedian climbed on the stern and shook his fist at the sky, shouting that if
there was a God, He should prove it by striking him dead.
There was, and He did.
But often the Lord of Death acts through other agents, even those with whom
we share a bathroom. Like the Green Bay fun-loving wife who slew her spouse
in what she claimed was a domestic jape gone wrong. She said she and her hubby
had often played "gun in the groin," a game in which she'd stick an empty shotgun
into his shorts and pull the trigger. Only this time the gun was awesomely loaded.
Then there are the wife's-cooking jokes. Dr. Michael Madigan was kidnapped
by the Djapa tribe, a small group of Amazon natives whose women devour their
men after mating. (It gives whole new meaning to the old post-coital query "How
was it for you?") A colleague found the new Djapa "wife" feasting on the groom.
"She was chewing on what remained on the forearm, I believe," the colleague
reported. "She grinned."
In August, a Houston woman hired a private investigator to tail her husband.
That shamus has video rolling when his employer killed her husband by running
him over three times with her silver Mercedes-Benz. "It was an accident," she
told police. She was a dentist.
Of course, the murder weapon need not cost $69,000. In June, I caught a TV
snippet that told of one Japanese man who'd failed to honor another by using
a honorific and, for that oversight, was slain by an umbrella. Naturally, my
imagination flamed up around the methodologies by which an umbrella can be turned
into a killing tool. But before I could come to any clear visualization, another
snippet scrawled across the bottom of the TV screen, informing the world that
this was the second umbrella slaying in Japan this month. I gave up. Do you
think there will be a movement to ban the sale of umbrellas in Japan?
Sometimes, folks exit the world stage by means of animals. In mid-summer Bangkok,
a 40-year-old woman climbed a 6-foot-fence to jump into a pool of crocs. Good
Lord, had she never seen Peter Pan? Never smile at a crocodile.
But a far more lethal animal is the chicken, at least in small villages in
south Egypt. There, a few years ago, an 18-year-old farmer went down a 60-foot
well to rescue a chicken that had fallen in. He got in trouble and soon was
joined by a sister, two brothers and two elderly spectators. By the time the
affair was over, everyone who'd gone into the well had drowned -- except, of
course, the chicken. Those who do not learn from history (even contemporary
village history) are doomed to repeat it.
Sadly, that body count in the Egyptian village of Nanlat Imara is not the
record for absurd dying on foreign soil. That would belong to Lima, Peru, and
a four-story disco named Utopia. Last July, standing next to the club disc jockey,
a fire-eating juggler was breathing columns of fire toward the ceiling when
nearby curtains caught fire. Two dozen nightclubbers vanished in this disco
inferno.
The way to end a column about dumb dying is with a dumb near-death experience
-- and this one's a beaut. Two guys in Michigan wanted to go ice-fishing but
didn't want the time or trouble of cutting a hole in the ice. So they lit and
threw a stick of dynamite with a 40-second fuse out onto the ice. Only their
loyal yellow lab bounded out to retrieve it. As he was returning it, the dog
became confused at the rather frantic animations of the two lazy fishermen who
were beseeching him to go somewhere else.
The yellow lab finally did, depositing the dynamite close by his master's
brand new Land Rover.
Watch these two guys. They could make a very funny exit.
