To Die Laughing: Caricatures of Death

Skip the B.S. 

by Skip Eisiminger

“It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.”—Woody Allen 

“Many who have their death gene cut out want it restored on getting the gout.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1/9/12—One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons drawn by Mick Stevens features a lemming doing a forward one-and-a-half flip off a spring board into the sea while his mates press on to the ragged brink. It seems to me that this three-ounce mammal gets death exactly right—he “embraces the suck” as GIs in Afghanistan are wont to say (in 2012, with no end in sight).

For over eight decades, the thoroughbred stable of New Yorker cartoonists (especially now with its free, on-line “Cartoon Bank”) has provided readers with amusing insights into the death sentence under which we all live. After my mother died in 2008, I entered “death” in the bank’s search engine and, while the archives did not “cure” my despair, à la Norman Cousins, I found myself chuckling again as I clicked on dozens of hits. At first, I felt like a kid ringing the Grim Reaper’s doorbell and running as fast as my legs would carry me. Eventually, I began lingering with the most pertinent panels and writing down some of the captions.

Gertrude Stein observed, “You have to learn to do everything, even to die,” and I have yet to find a more tolerable way of weaving death into life than immersing myself in the work of the humorists whose work I’ve plundered below.

In the words of an Inuit son to his aging father, “You have to go with the floe.”

Although the progression for most readers over 50 will be familiar, I’ve created ten subcategories to give a semblance of order to the often chaotic process of dying. I begin with a patient’s voice in a doctor’s office and close with a vulture in a cemetery.

1. John Handelsman gives readers a glimpse of Planet Kevorkian when he has a patient telephone her physician. Says the doctor,“Before we try assisted suicide, Mrs. Rose, let’s give the aspirin a chance.”
2. No one has exploited the black-comedic possibilities of the hospital waiting room more fully than Frank Cotham. One of his swaggering medicos strolls through the swinging doors leading from surgery saying, “Ah, the lovely widow.”
3. Transitioning to the bedside of the terminally ill, Peter Steiner imagines a patient speaking his last words: “I always lived vicariously. Why can’t I die vicariously?”
4. Moving right on to the funeral home, Jack Ziegler posits a casket salesman asking a couple, “What will it take to put one of you two into a brand-new Eterna-500 today?”
5. At an open-casket viewing, William Hamilton imagines a mourner bending over a stylish corpse saying, “She could always shop.”
6. Moving out to the cemetery, Peter Steiner has an unctuous valet address a tombstone with, “Will that be all, Sir?”
7. Before heaven’s gate, Charlie Barsotti’s St. Peter says to a clown, “Well, that was a birthday party the kids won’t soon forget.”
8. Inside the gates, one woman drawn by Jim Gregory tells her husband, “I can’t wait for all our friends to die.”
9. Back on earth, at the reading of the will, a lawyer drawn by Lee Lorenz reports to some anxious heirs: “Not much in the way of hard assets, I’m afraid, but he did leave some highly desirable organs.”
10. Outside the lawyer’s office sits Matthew Diffee’s vulture, who says to a passing reaper, “Love your work.”

Rocker Keith Richards proved that one can take my irreverent-immersion technique too far when he snorted the ashes of his father with “a bit of blow.” Except for the occasional psychopath, most of us are thanatophobes at heart who believe every day on the green side of the sod is preferable to the roots.

Many will recall Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Socrates reaching for the hemlock with one hand and pointing calmly toward heaven (or is it the ceiling of his jail cell?) with the other. To die stoically, we’ve been told, is to succeed at death. As much as I respect the Socratic example, I plan to die laughing at age 150, shortly after sex. A merry wake with lots of free alcohol and Viagra will be provided for those who might need it (the latter, that is).