Memalvada

When, in movies, tv shows, etc, I watch somebody die in a particularly violent way, it often strikes me as funny.

It's happened to me before when im watching the movie, and somebody is being killed/tortured, and im the only one in the theatre who is laughing.

Does this happen to anyone else? Or am I the only sick bastard here?

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bermuDa

maybe it's knowing it's all staged, I find theatrical deaths pretty funny too... real deaths I don't really laugh at... unless they're in the darwin awards

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LaughingCow

I usually find it funny too. My mom says I'm sick, but I can't help it, lol

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The_Dude

not really, after all it's all fiction.

maybe it's a cheaply made show that makes it so funny?

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skysooner

I have a standing joke with the wife. When an actor dies in a movie, etc., I tell her it was because they asked for a raise. This came out of the movie Tootsie when they gave a character a brain tumor because she asked for a raise. Pretty stupid, but then stupid humor just cracks me up.

Plan9Senior

I think that you have nothing to worry about if you find movie death scenes funny. If, in the future, you find yourself masturbating to the death scenes, that is when you might want to question your mental health.

hobo

If the death is in a comical way, well ofcourse I find it funny. If it is serious and part of a good drama, I tend to feel sorry for the person.

mingusfingers

I can go either way, usually depends on the state of mind I'm in. But yeah, I've had that.

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badflsh

This same thing happened to me when I went to see Pulp Fiction with a friend. The scene when the guy gets shot in the back of the car...my friend and I were cracking up while everyone else was just silent.

I wouldn’t worry to much about it though. I am sure that watching it in a movie has absolutely nothing in common with real life. I have no doubt you would react much differently in a real situation, though, hopefully you will never have to find out for sure.

rossco_g

I think we just become so desensitized to violence (and sex) in movies that it becomes quite comical. we should however never loose touch of the reality of some situations.

obediah

Well you could always dig up one of those Faces of Death movies and see if you laugh through it. Or a drivers ed film, or one of the holocaust documentaries.

Any of those should let you know if you're fucked up pretty quickly.


Some times movie death is just too over the top. The Normandy scene in Saving Private Ryan had me all icked out the first time or two I saw it, but now I laugh through it. I'm not sure if it's a defense mechanism, or just being desensitized through repitition.

marshall26

final destination 1 and 2 make me laugh for that very reason

fuzzix

People often laugh at something when in fact it is distressing them. Its one of those weird fucked up things about people, like when you see a kid fall over and skin his knee and you laugh, but really you want to cry. You might be disturbed as hell and not even know it. Disturbed as in you don't actually like what you're seeing, not that you're a crackpot ;p

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RoadRage

You probably would've thought this place was a hoot.

From http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_072.html

Dear Cecil:

I found an obscure reference to a place called the Grand Guignol in Paris. It said some pretty twisted stuff happened there for the amusement of others. Do you know anything about it? Was it theatrics or the real McCoy (or should I say McCabre)? How do you pronounce Grand Guignol? --Mike McGary, Dallas

Cecil replies:

Well, we can't have you prowling around Paris looking for the Grand Goog-nole, Mike: you say it Gron Geen-yole. Not that you're going to find it no matter how you say it; the place closed in 1962. Too bad. I bet it would have been a trip.

The Theatre du Grand Guignol, for years one of the leading tourist attractions of the French capital, was the classic shock theatre, specializing in productions designed to horrify and sicken. No show was considered a success unless at least a couple audience members fainted or upchucked on their shoes. In its latter years, what with competition from Hollywood horror films and real life nightmares like Auschwitz, the Grand Guignol became pretty campy. But in its day it produced some truly terrifying theatre that explored, admittedly for low commercial purposes, the dark limits of what could be accomplished on the stage.

In some ways the subject matter of the Grand Guignol wasn't all that different from what you can see today in any number of Friday the 13th-type slasher movies. But there were a couple key differences: this was live, in-your-face and sometimes all-over-your-clothes theatre conducted in a disconcertingly intimate space--the place seated only about 285 and the stage measured just 20 by 20 feet. Equally important, the plays, which were short and usually ran three or more to a bill, partook of the queasily amoral outlook that we are pleased to think of as peculiarly French. The characters typically were brutal louts, hapless victims, or both. The guilty often went unpunished. Lovers and friends routinely betrayed one another. For comic relief the producers might throw in a sex farce featuring the lineup of seedy characters and illicit affairs you'd pretty much expect in the land of the feelthy postcard--a harmless enough business in itself, but in context adding to the air of Parisian sleaze.

The Grand Guignol's main stock in trade was gory special effects (and they were only that; we're not talking snuff theatre here). In description today the effects seem pretty tame, but remember that they were carried off at close range, with no retakes, using stuff that was scrounged mainly from the drugstore and the butcher shop. Eyeball gougings were perennially popular, animal eyes being especially useful for this purpose because they could be relied upon to bounce when hitting the floor. Then you had your disembowelings, your self-mutilations, your throat slashings, your rapes, your acid thrown in the face, your flesh ripped from the bone ... predictable stuff, I suppose. But in the most effective Grand Guignol plays it was coupled with a shrewd grasp of the psychology of horror plus an over-the-top gallic love of the nutso that can weird you out even today. Historian Mel Gordon, in The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (1988), recounts some of the plots:

• The innocent Louise is unjustly locked in an asylum with several insane women. A nurse assigned to protect her blithely leaves for a staff party as soon as Louise falls asleep. The insane women decide that a cuckoo bird is imprisoned in Louise's head and and one gouges out her eye with a knitting needle. The other crazy women are freaked and burn the gouger's face off on a hot plate.
• Two brothers have an orgy with two prostitutes at a lighthouse. The lighthouse beacon goes out and one of the brothers realizes a boat containing their mother is heading toward the rocks. But the drunken lighthouse keeper has locked the beacon door. The brother goes nuts, blames everything on an earlier blasphemy by one of the hookers, slits her throat, and throws her out the window. "The boat with the men's mother crashes against the rocks," Gordon says. "In a religious frenzy, the [brothers] decide to burn [the other prostitute] to death. After pouring gasoline on her, they incinerate her and pray." The end.

And you thought The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was sick.

--CECIL ADAMS

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CSflim

What!? Are you kidding!? That scene was hilarious! But it was SUPPOSED to be hilarious.
I think Memalvada is reffering to deaths which aren't supposed to be funny.

As for me, if I laugh at a film death when it supposed to be serious, then it means that the director hasn't done a good enough job.

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crow_daw

Well, sometimes even when a death is supposed to serious, it cracks me up big time, because its poorly executed. Like a shitty ass horror film that takes itself entirely too seriously, and some of the death scenes are really funny, even though you can tell they're not supposed to be. But now, when Brian Piccolo dies in Brian's Song, or big John Coffee in The Green Mile, if anyone laughed at those, I'd be a little worried.

I named those two scenes because both made me cry like a little bitch.

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Beltruckus

Anyone remember in Pulp Fiction when Butch hits the guy thats trying to kill him for ruining his staged boxing match and then crashes, the Crime boss dude tries to shoot at him and hits the fat lady? Well i laughed at that and got punched by 3 different girls in the same room. If you see her reaction it's VERY comical.

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Beltruckus

Same they were very emotional, especially the "i'm in heaven, i'm in heaven" Was very moving in my opinion.

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The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings. Words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out. -Stephen King

s8ins child

yeh a lot of deaths i find so funny at how lame they can be but if its a pretty gd looking death (if there is such a thing) i jst snigger and thats it.i like funny deaths though.

Phaenx

I laughed my ass off at that part in the Two Towers where the ents ravaged that city and were picking people up by the feet and used them as a club. That entire scene was god damn hilarious.

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YourNeverThere

I laughed my ass off when Jack from Titanic died. Not at him though, in that scene when he dies and they slowly pan out over the water and I caught a look at the bloated blue headed people that looked fake and just started laughing and laughing. It was insane.
Also i recently watched "Adaptation" and the part where cage does flying through the window made me laugh so so hard, i love when the deaths are surprising, so its more of a "HOLY! HAHAHAhahaa" thing.

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Jack Ruby

Funny or not, noone dies quite as well as Gary Oldman. JFK and Bram Stoker's Dracula are both proof of this.

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TaLoN

i find any form of death hilarious. i would rather see someone die than see someone live, everyone living is just gonna lead to overpopulation

Spritebox

When people are hit by cars it's funny....in movies.

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