I recall a discussion on recovering MIA’s from Vietnam, typically pilots. The article mentioned that pilots who never ejected, were in a crash where they went from 600mph+ to 0 in no time. The investigators said the proof of this was that the sides of their boots blew out, when the liquid content of their bodies was stopped by their boots.
IANAFP (I Am Not A Forensic Pathologist) but I’ll make an educated layman’s guess. Essentially, you suffer a massive blow to your entire body. YMMV depending on what hits first - head, feet, front, back… the force of the remainder of your body landing on top of the part that hits first results in severe bone breakage. Bashed in skull? Loss of blood pressure means loss of consciousness in seconds or less (see the big long discussion here on “can you live for a few seconds when your head is chopped off?”). Spinal cord disconnections probably affect ability to breathe, if crushed ribs haven’t done so; the pressure of the impact will collapse the lungs. some of the impact and the pointy bits of bone and tearing of different organs as they slosh around - will mean that blood vessels tear in many places, as does the skin, and all the blood will run out.
Also - a 10 story fall - say 100 feet - will only take less than 3 seconds; so your comedic snuffee better think fast.
Some data points:
There’s a very famous picture of a starlet who had committed suicide jumping off the Empire State Building. She did a perfect landing on a car roof, from the top she appears perfectly fine, although the car roof is pushed in a ways. She was dead. I assume the other side of her was not so pretty.
There’s the case of a fellow who jumped from a burning bomber over Germany without a parachute. He woke up in the forest a few hours later, and walked away. The thought is he hit enough tree branches on the way through the forest canopy to stop safely, and landed in snow.
An article I read once in Penthouse (see, they have articles and people read them) was about the early days of Hollywood, the crazy and dangerous stunts done for the movies and some directors’ callous disregard for safety. After several dozen attempts to film a stuntman climbing from the top of a train onto a rope ladder dangling from an aircraft - the final go-round, the fellow was so tired he was only hanging by his hands, fell from almost a hundred feet, and landed standing upright. He died a few hours later, but when they got to him, his shin bones had broken through the bottom of his shoes.
Deaths are not usually pretty.
