I almost died laughing. Not metaphorically, literally

I’ve knocked on death’s door and heard it creaking open, after a couple of botched surgical procedures. And then there was the time I almost died laughing...

Funny bone: Jacques Tati

Many claim to have had an NDE, a “near death experience”. On briefly carking it, they report being welcomed to another realm by a shimmering figure or somesuch. All very lyrical and reassuring. Two of my friends – Kerry Packer, and the ABC’s Robyn Williams – were technically dead for a time before rejoining us, and neither returned with glad tidings confirming an afterlife. Though Kerry found his glimpse of the Beyond liberating, saying: “There’s no one there to greet you. There’s no one there to judge you. So you can do what you effing well like.”

I too have knocked on death’s door and heard it creaking open, following a couple of botched surgical procedures. And then there was the time I almost died laughing. Not metaphorically, literally. The figure I saw was not angelic but a drunken French postman.

My NDE was at the Dendy cinema in Brighton, Melbourne, about 60 years ago. I was watching Jour de Fete (1949), the first feature directed by Jacques Tati, a few years before his masterpiece Mr Hulot’s Holiday. Jour de Fete, titled The Big Day here, was set in the rural village of Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre, with the real villagers providing most of the cast. It tells of the blunderings of the postman – played by Tati – on the big day the carousel starts spinning in the town square, along with a few tatty sideshows and a tent cinema. And the damned film damn near killed me.

The sight gag that almost did me in involved the postie, inebriated during the festivities, completing his round on a rickety bicycle that also seemed inebriated. Tati parks the thing beside a fence and, when attempting to remount, swings a ludicrously long leg over both bike and fence. Despite his persistent efforts, it is of course impossible to pedal. I was convulsed. Nothing in Chaplin or Keaton had ever had the same effect. Choking for air, my heart wildly palpitating, I felt myself slipping from the seat onto the floor among the lolly wrappings… and started to lose consciousness. I knew that, yes, I was laughing myself to death. There are worse ways to go (as I’d discover later in a long life) but then, dying in the Dendy, I was dimly aware of the irony.

You have been warned. I saw the film in black and white. It was subsequently restored by Tati’s daughter in the experimental colour system that was used in the filming but deemed a failure, and this polychrome version is currently proffered on SBS World Movies. I’ve found the courage to download it but not to watch it again. Having narrowly survived it in my youth – apparently my companions saved me without the need for an ambulance – I lack the bravery to tempt fate and fatality by meeting Tati’s character a second time. The Grim Reaper in the guise of a French postman.

Don’t mention the war. Tati’s film is set in a bucolic, sentimentalised France just after the defeat of the Nazis. Which reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about the joke that killed Germans. Deemed the funniest joke ever told, it was amplified and broadcast at the Hun by brave British troops wearing earplugs. On the receiving end of this weaponised wit the Nazis would stand, stiffen and topple like ninepins. One hopes that this joke is now under lock and key, like poison gas and other chemical weapons banned by the Geneva Conventions.

Being given what the Goon Show character Bluebottle called “the dreaded deadings” via laughter is all very amusing. Unless you’ve had my experience at the dreaded Dendy.