When You Can’t Stop Laughing

Photo: “One of these days, you’re gonna die laughing.” Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)

The 1988 mixed animation-live action film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, set in 1940s Toon Town, had a whimsical villain called Judge Doom with a team of henchmen in tow known as the Toon Patrol. The Toon Patrol was formed by a group of anthropomorphized weasels who had a quick-to-trigger sense of humor that led to a conversation foreshadowing future events with the other weasels:

Weasel: Stop that laughing. Do ya know what happens when ya can’t stop laughing? One of these days, you’re gonna die laughing.

Near the end of the film, Judge Doom makes another observation about the laughing habits of the weasels by exclaiming:

Judge Doom: One of these days, you (Weasels) are going to laugh yourselves to death.

Without disappointing, the following scene was hysterical with each Weasel falling into some morbidly slap-stick dilemma, each one of them dropping like flies. The weasels’ angelic forms separating from their plank-board physical forms were evidence they had died laughing.

It seems funny when dying from laughter happens in cartoons, yet dying from laughter, albeit a happy way to go, is a lot less common with human characters—Vizzini from the Princess Bride and the Melting Wicked Witch of the West in some versions of The Wizard of Oz are the only fictional humans I can name off the top of my head who died laughing.

At the end of the day, laughter would be most preferable reaction over any other sound effect.


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