The Oscar-winning comedy so funny it killed someone: “They carried him out dead”
In 2025, it’s not uncommon to be told, “You killed it!” if you do something exceptionally well. However, in the case of a 1988 Oscar-winning comedy starring John Cleese, Kevin Kline, and Jamie Lee Curtis, the idea that they “killed” in their efforts to make a hilarious film might make them feel a bit queasy.
This is because, in a quite surreal turn of events, A Fish Called Wanda is said to have caused a man to laugh himself to death at a screening.
Brilliantly, the origins of the film are as absurd as the movie itself. In 1983, Cleese was sitting by a hotel swimming pool with his friend Charles Crichton, a director he’d wanted to collaborate with back in the late 1960s, but it never worked out. They began to bat around ideas for a new comedy that Crichton could direct and Cleese star in. Hilariously, their future Oscar winner sprang from two disparate, silly notions: Cleese’s idea of a stuttering character struggling to deliver critical exposition, and Crichton’s desire to shoot a scene in which a steamroller flattens someone.
Ultimately, they came up with a batty crime caper about a gang of thieves who double-cross each other to be the first to get hold of some diamonds stolen by their incarcerated leader. Cleese played a repressed lawyer seduced by Curtis’ con woman into helping her find the diamonds while Kline portrayed Otto, supposedly a former CIA Agent, in the role that netted him the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar. Michael Palin, Cleese’s old Monty Python buddy, was also along for the ride as the stuttering animal lover who first got Cleese’s creative juices flowing.
“I think laughing yourself to death is a nice way to do it”.
John Cleese
The resulting movie turned out to be a Hollywood unicorn: an out-and-out comedy that was nominated for three Oscars, made nearly $200million at the box office, and was fawned over by critics. Crucially, though, it also made audiences roll in the aisles with laughter, which was music to the ears of Cleese and company. Well, right up until they found out about a certain Danish audiologist.
In 1989, during a screening of the film, Dr Ole Bentzen began laughing uncontrollably only a few minutes in, and simply never stopped. As his medical assistant, Einer Randel, told Medicine Today, “I was shocked to hear him break out laughing like that. The next thing I knew, he was dead”.
According to Cleese, Bentzen was a well-known figure in the Danish town of Aarhus, and the Fawlty Towers legend claimed, “He had a huge laugh. A famous laugh. Very popular”. Then, with a bemused shake of the head, he said, “They carried him out dead. He’d had a heart attack”. Cleese wasn’t wrong, either; Bentzen’s official cause of death was heart fibrillation, which could have been brought on by excessive laughter that increased his heart rate.
When the cast and crew of the movie found out about Bentzen’s tragically unusual passing, Cleese and Palin couldn’t help thinking of a sketch they did with Monty Python two decades earlier about a joke so funny that it literally kills someone. In 2018, Palin told Vanity Fair, “That was an extraordinary and dreadful accident. He must have laughed very hard indeed. Quite a tribute… I think Python was actually a series of premonitions which are gradually coming true.”
Cleese, however, confessed that his initial reaction to hearing about Bentzen’s untimely demise was to use it to boost ticket sales for the movie. He even considered trying to contact the late doctor’s widow. After all, what could guarantee more butts in seats than advertising their comedy as something so funny that it might kill you? Thankfully, though, either he came to his senses or cooler heads prevailed, and he acknowledged, “I think we decided it was in too bad taste”.
Still, if you ask Cleese, dying while experiencing the joy of laughter isn’t the worst way to shuffle off this mortal coil. “I mean, we all have to go,” he mused, “And I think laughing yourself to death is a nice way to do it”.
