Last Laughs and Dead Ends: How to Get Death’s Goat, or Let’s Put the “Yin” Back in Dying

Lou Marinoff

doi:10.1515/phhumyb-2020-0014

Article

Last Laughs and Dead Ends: How to Get Death’s Goat, or Let’s Put the “Yin” Back in Dying

Lou Marinoff
The City College of the City University of New York;

Published/Copyright: May 18, 2020

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From the journal The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook Volume 1 Issue 1

Abstract

The article’s purpose is to illustrate ways in which renowned philosophers, statesmen, and poets—as well as family members and friends of this author—utilized humor to express fearlessness of or contempt for death, or indeed to mock others’ fears of dying or tendencies to treat death too seriously. If Sigmund Freud was correct in hypothesizing that humor is the ego’s defense against life’s affronts, and if death poses the greatest possible affront to life, then jokes about death are the strongest protests we can lodge against our own mortality.

Keywords: gallows humor; deathbed humor; jokes about death and dying

About the author

Lou Marinoff

The City College of the City University of New York;

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Published Online: 2020-05-18

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https://doi.org/10.1515/phhumyb-2020-0014

Keywords for this article

gallows humor; deathbed humor; jokes about death and dying