Slapstick Death

Wait a minute, someone must be pulling my leg...the guy who owns Segway (James Heselden) goes off a cliff while riding on a Segway and plunges into a river, killing himself? 

This is the kind of comically absurd death that Blake Edwards might have invented for one of his '60s or '70s farces. The man's death is tragic but it does make you chuckle in an abstract way. You picture a grainy black and white image straight out of a Buster Keaton two-reeler.

Films have been able to make death funny when keeping  the particulars vague and emphasizing the random bad luck that goes into suddenly being killed -- its inevitability, illogic, lack of fairness.

There's a moment in John Frankenheimer's "The Train" when a bespectacled German sergeant wakes up from a nap in a caboose on a stalled train, opens up the rear door and sees another train heading right for him. He barely has time to react before the crash decimates the caboose.  Why is this funny? Because of the timing of the cuts and the fact that we don't see the sergeant suffer.

There's another moment in Mike Nichols' "Day of the Dolphin" when a dolphin plants a magnetized bomb on the hull of a yacht carrying a group of scheming bad guys. Cut to a shot of them sitting around a poker table. One of the baddies -- a young dolphin trainer who has betrayed his colleagues -- hears a sound, gets up, goes to a porthole and sees the dolphin swimming away. He puts two and two together, goes "oh, shit" and BLAM! It's funny because of the editing, and the way the actor delivers the "oh, shit" line. If it hadn't been done just so it wouldn't have worked.