Is There Such a Thing as a Funny Death?

I realise that, from the safety of half a world away, being killed by a horny camel or a flying stingray might seem quite amusing, but is probably a whole lot less so if you're, say, a newly-grieving widow or orphaned child.

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that I know someone is dead, I still find it impossible to treat death-by-stingray with any solemnity.

Why? Because I'm a psychopath? There are psychiatrists working on that but even if I was it still wouldn't explain why almost everyone feels the same way (it's OK, you can admit it) or why more run-of-the-mill accidental deaths, like car crashes, inspire in me only horror.

I have long been an advocate of the view that either everything is potentially funny, including death, or nothing is. The joke about the chicken crossing the road and what the blind, deaf and dumb boy got for Christmas (the answer's cancer, by the way) both operate on the same principle -- life is ultimately absurd and the universe hates us.

This is why it is incorrect to assume when people laugh at a story about a woman who was killed by a fish blow to the head that they are in some way laughing at the victim.

The laughter is that of recognition. Stories like these are funny because they could happen to us. We laugh from a surfeit of empathy, not a lack.

The flying stingray reminds us that life is transient, deeply unfair, and possibly futile, but for every dark cloud there's always a little ray of sunshine.