Funny historical deaths

One of the fascinations as regards history seems to be death and how historical figures seem to meet them. This grim facet of history is ever present in my area as historians are constantly quoting figures on just how many people died during the Thirty Years War, whether from fighting, disease or starvation. Yes, fascination with death is a dark and important part of the discipline, and it's perhaps most macabre manifestation is that of the funny death. My thoughts were brought towards this by way of an article on the BBC website today:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13762313

The Tudors it seems, died of many different causes, including runaway bears, falling into moats whilst baking bread, getting attacked by cows and having your testicles crushed. The last one made my eyes water somewhat. Naturally this phenomenon was not isolated to the Tudors. Chinese poet Li Po (701-706) after falling into the water from a boat after having pondered the moon just that little bit too hard, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601) died from an infected bladder after he had attempted to hold his pee in during a particularly long banquet, and King Adolf Frederick of Sweden died in 1771 after eating a meal of lobster, caviar, saurkraut, cabbage soup, smoked herring, champagne and 14 servings of his favorite dessert: semla, a bun filled with marzipan and milk. The semla is still extensively eaten in Sweden. These are deaths that are hard for anyone but the most rich, or the most obsessed in the case of Li Po.

Indeed, as I typed the title of this post into Google, a large number of websites came up. Would I prefer deaths in a weird way, deaths that were ironic or deaths that occured during sex. Mind you, it seems to me that people who died in modern times in humorous ways are just as much of a fascination. The website for the Darwin awards (deaths that prove that evolution is alive and well) has always been one of my favourites, and suggests that despite all its achievements, mankind isn't quite as clever as it has painted itself:

http://www.darwinawards.com/

One wonders then, why this slightly dark obsession with death and how people meet it? Satirising death may be a symptom of a modern society that is ever more concerned with what happens after you die, a factor that is not more prevalent in today's society than in any other, but one that is perhaps these days more complicated. I am making this conclusion far too simplistic, as the effect of death on society is one that is a whole discipline in itself, and one that has it's own institute at the University of Bath. Therefore I will leave it to them to suggest why people view death the way they do, however from a personal point of view and from one of my profession it is just intriguing to see the interest in historical people dying in  humorous ways.