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Oscar had no idea that one little comedy might one day take someone out and not in the metaphorical “nailed it” way people say in 2025. You see, back in 1988, A Fish Called Wanda rolled into cinemas like a steamroller, with few basic elements, like a silly plan, a stuttering animal lover, a CIA wannabe and a diamond heist gone sideways.
However, somehow, it rolled right over a poor Danish man’s heart. Literally.
A Fish Called Wanda (1988) Charles Crichton. pic.twitter.com/6MjlCEeIMS
— Juan Ferrer (@JuanFerrerVila) August 6, 2018
How a Poolside Chat Turned into an Oscar-Winning Comedy
It all started a few years earlier when John Cleese was loafing around a hotel pool with director Charles Crichton, an old friend he had been trying to work with since dinosaurs roamed the BBC. They kicked around some half-baked ideas, one involving a character who could not get a sentence out and another featuring a human pancake flattened by a steamroller. Naturally, this evolved into a plot about criminals double-crossing each other for shiny rocks.
The Oscar soon took notice of it following the film’s critical and financial success. It got three Oscar nominations which included one win and nearly $200 million in box office treasure. The critics loved it, fans howled with laughter and Cleese probably felt smug for at least five solid months.
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The Movie That Literally Made a Man Die Laughing
But then came the curveball. A Danish audiologist named Dr Ole Bentzen attended a screening and somewhere around the part where Kevin Kline’s Otto acted like a lunatic, Bentzen started laughing.
“He had a huge laugh. A famous laugh. Very popular,” Cleese claimed, per Far Out Magazine. “They carried him out dead. He’d had a heart attack.” The doctors blamed heart fibrillation which was likely triggered by extreme laughter.
When Cleese found out, he apparently considered running with it as a marketing ploy. He probably would have imagined something like “come see the film that actually killed a guy,” splashed across movie posters but fortunately, the idea stayed in the draft folder because exploiting someone’s fatal chuckle for ticket sales did not sit quite right, at least not for long.
Still, Cleese was not entirely heartbroken. If someone’s going to keel over, laughter beats slipping on a banana peel or choking on soup. Monty Python had joked about lethal comedy years earlier, and now life had, annoyingly, caught up with satire.
So while A Fish Called Wanda did not invent the idea of laughing to death, it may have set the bar. One man, one movie and a fatal giggle fit. While Oscar went to Kline and applause went to the cast, a Danish doctor got the weirdest obituary imaginable.
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