10 Times People Died While Watching Movies

3. A Fish Called Wanda's Chips Scene Proved Too Funny For A 56-Year-Old Danish Man

A Fish Called Wanda
United International Pictures

As it turns out, people laughing themselves to death while watching movies is more common than that single Grand Masti incident, as the exact same thing happened to a man named Ole Bentzen in 1989.

By all accounts, the 56-year-old Danish audiologist was in good health, with no significant medical issues to speak of. But when he went to see A Fish Called Wanda, he found one particular scene so funny - the part where Ken gets some chips shoved up his nose by Otto - that he ended up laughing himself to death. His laughter made his heart rate rise to unbelievably dangerous levels, resulting in a fatal heart attack.

It's been said that Bentzen laughed so much because this scene reminded him of a real-life incident he'd experienced with his own family, where they all started putting pieces of cauliflower up their noses around the dinner table. Hopefully, nobody ate theirs afterwards.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!