Lights Out

Wait a minute, c’mon…the guy who owns Segway (James Heselden) goes off a cliff while riding on a Segway and plunges into a river, killing himself? This actually happened?

This is the kind of comically absurd death that Blake Edwards might have invented for one of his ’60s or ’70s farces. It would have fit right into J. Lee Thompson‘s What A Way To Go!, which is about four guys who die “comically” (Dick Van Dyke, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly) after marrying Shirley MacLaine, who carries some kind of black-widow, rotten-luck curse.

What A Way To Go! was one of those glossy, brazenly shallow and grossly unfunny big-studio comedies that were built around MacLaine’s popularity in the wake of Irma La Douce. But I’ll bet men in pubs all over England right now are chuckling (or at least shaking their heads and grinning) about Heselden’s death. If his death has been videotaped it would have been ghastly to watch, but thinking about it as an abstraction — a bit that might have been used in a Laurel & Hardy two-reeler — is somehow funny.

The trick in making death seem “funny” is to keep the particulars vague and emphasize 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 Germany-bound train, opens up the rear door and sees another train heading right for him. He barely has time to react before the crash totally decimates the caboose . Why is this funny? Because of the precise timing of the cutting 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 large 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.

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24 thoughts on “Lights Out”

  1. The good news is that the Segway stayed in perfect balance the whole way down.

    Add The Ladykillers (the original Alec Guinness version) to the list of movies that successfully make a succession of bad luck deaths seem funny. It certainly hews to your formulation of keeping the particulars vague and emphasizing the bad luck and inevitability. The deaths also seem like a form of absurd justice for their repeated attempts to kill the indestructible old lady.

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  2. If you are the type to believe they “go in threes,” then after this guy and the guy who gave us The Club going in an auto accident are we next going to lose James Dyson when some sort of bizarre attempt to us one of his machines for onanism?

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  5. Wells: while it’s a TV episode, not a film… any talk of making death “funny” begins and ends with the famous “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode of The Mary Tyler Moore show. Still a classic to this day, it manages to be both hilariously funny and very poignant. Some of the best television writing ever.

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  11. He was found in his hotel room impaled on a large electrical device. Our surgeons did what they could but it took them two hours just to get the smile off his face.

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  12. Another great Alec Guisness film that made death funny – Kind Hearts and Coronets. It was like watching the Twits die in the Monty Python competition.

    Also the dogs in A Fish Called Wanda. And the fake deaths of Harold and Maude.

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