The end of Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet, where Hamlet kills Claudius not just the usual two, but three times: he impales him with a chandelier, then force-feeds him the poisoned wine, and stabs him with the poisoned rapier. No matter how many times I see it, at this point, I have to laugh and think, Okay, Hamlet, I think you got him!
In one of the earlier films about the Titanic tragedy (either A Night to Remember or the 1950’s Titanic, I’m not certain which), there is a scene where the pretty young romantic couple is in the water, and a smokestack falls on them. It never used to strike me as funny before, but the last time I saw it, I thought, So much for Jack and Rose, and burst out laughing.
It isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but for some odd reason, the death of Leonard Bast in Howard’s End amuses me. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to the poor guy–whose life and death are both rather pathetically and/or tragically sad–but that his heart was failing and he was going to die that day in any case; there is such a nice, ironic sense of cosmic justice in exactly how and where he does die, so that it does the most good for Helen and their child. Plus, the symbolism of his being crushed under a shelf full of books seems rather, well, heavy.
Harkonnen’s death in Lynch’s Dune was so over the top it was funny.
An off-camera non-violent death that made me laugh: when Demi Moore and Gary Oldman starred in the remake of The Scarlet Letter, Ouija boards all over the world started picking up legal depositions from Nathaniel Hawthorne wanting his name removed. They changed everything about the book and all of it for the hysterical, adding in witch trials and witch hangings and runaway slaves and stopping just short of having George Washington and Abraham Lincoln galloping into town in the 17th century.
In the book, the book opens with Hester being publicly shamed while holding her illegitimate baby and ends with Reverend Dimmesdale dies as he confesses fathering Pearl. The movie changes both: it begins when Hester arrives in town, she meets Dimmesdale, jokes with him about being a witch (now there is a topic that Puritan women loved to be coy about- “I’m not fornicating with the Horned One… or am I?”), and then you get to see Pearl conceived while Hester’s naked slave does some weird twirling dance in the barn, then forever and an hour later after they’ve been accused of witchcraft and all sorts of other things not even remotely linked to the book, Dimmesdale doesn’t die but rides off into the sunset with Hester and Pearl.
Then a voiceover from the unseen and grown Pearl: “My father died in a smallpox epidemic the next year…”
WHY? You changed the source to let them end up together, then you kill him off anyway. That would be like changing GWTW so that Rhett comes back to Scarlett, but it turns out she’s just realized her problem is she’s a lesbian and she and Prissy move down to the Bahamas and open a casino.