Funny Aneurysm Moment/Recorded and Stand Up Comedy

"Phil: Downhill!
 * Of all the sketch comedy shows out there (past and present), none have more FAM's than NBC's Saturday Night Live. Some are Hilarious in Hindsight (in a Gallows Humor way); others suck the humor right out of the joke faster than excessive Memetic Mutation of SNL's jokes and catchphrases ever could. Some examples:
 * The infamous "Don't Look Back in Anger" short film that showed an elderly John Belushi as the last living member of the original "Not Ready for Primetime" cast who ends up dancing on his cast mates' graves. (What's more disturbing is that the short film "predicted" that Gilda Radner would be one of the dead cast members) you can watch the clip here.
 * The worst part is Belushi's comment that "they all thought [he'd] be the first to go" (a reference to his then already well known excessive lifestyle). Ha ha ha...
 * A lesser known example from the "Not Ready for Prime Time" era is in a sketch known as "Least-Loved Bedtime Stories." Michael O'Donoghue narrates a story called "The Little Engine that Died," where he says "I think I can...I Think I Can...HEARTATTACK...OHMYGODTHEPAIN!" In 1994, "Mr. Mike" woke up, felt what was thought to be a severe migraine headache, and screamed "OH MY GOD" in pain and later died from cerebral hemorrhage. Michael O'Donoghue was an SNL writer known for his sadistic humor and his frequent migraines, making this death a literal "funny aneurysm moment" and a Karmic Death.
 * On season 5 (the 1979-1980 season), Strother Martin hosted SNL. One of the sketches he was in was about a dying man who recorded a video will. In August of 1980, Strother Martin died, not only making the episode (Martin's last acting gig, mind you) he hosted a Missing Episode, but making the video will sketch a lot less funny.
 * Any time Chris Farley faked a heart attack during the Chicago Superfans sketches. Also, the one-off sketch where Farley plays a man called "The Relapse Guy" who keeps going on and falling off the wagon.
 * The final sketch on the season 19 finale hosted by Heather Locklear where Phil Hartman sings a lullaby to Chris Farley. It was meant to be sweet and signal the end of the season, but with both Farley and Hartman dead, it's now too depressing to watch.
 * On the season 11 premiere hosted by Madonna, there was a cold opening where then-NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff announces that he's subjecting the 1985-1986 season cast to mandatory urine tests for drugs (this sketch was later Edited for Syndication, as the censors in the 1980s thought that the idea of urine testing was too taboo for late-night TV at the time -- never mind that SNL is supposed to be the vanguard of edgy, late-night TV humor). One of the cast members during the 11th season was a 20-year-old Robert Downey, Jr., who would later spend all of the 1990s being more well-known for his drug abuse and arrests than his movies (though it was playing drug addicts that got Downey, Jr. back into stardom in the 2000s. Go figure).
 * When Phil Hartman came back to host for the second time (in season 22 -- the 1996-1997 season), he says in his monologue that he bought his family's affection with the money he makes from being on "News Radio" and "The Simpsons." Apparently, it didn't work, when you consider what happened to Hartman a few months after he hosted.
 * The episode hosted by Charlize Theron on the 2000-2001 season had a cold opening called "A Glimpse into Our Possible Future," a sketch showing what would happen to America if George W. Bush were President (and later, if Al Gore were President and if Ralph Nader were President). While the sketch did exaggerate how far George W. Bush (played by Will Ferrell) would run America into the ground (like setting the Great Lakes on fire or giving Texas to Communists), lines like, "I hope I get a war. Wars are like executions supersized," and "I killed Dick Cheney in a hunting accident" (and the fact that his new map of the United States shows several flooded states starting in Louisiana and pooling in the Midwest and California as a flaming wreck) now don't seem so funny.
 * When she came back to host the last episode of season 30 in 2005, Lindsay Lohan is visited by "Future Lindsay" (played by Amy Poehler), who tells her to take it easy with the partying. Cut to five years later, and jokes about Lindsay Lohan becoming a drunken, drugged-out mess with no career aren't so funny anymore.
 * On the Seth Rogen/Phoenix episode from season 34, Seth Meyers (the Weekend Update anchor) did a report on how during Michael Jackson's summer world tour, he would bring his son onstage, who would be accompanied by a police officer who would have Michael Jackson arrested. Unfortunately, the concert (and the punchline to the joke) would never come to pass due to Jackson's death two months after the episode originally aired.
 * Then there's that SNL Digital Short where Bill Hader plays a man who writes a letter to his sister and his friend (played by Andy Samberg) shoots him, leading to the shooting deaths of another man (played by episode host Shia LaBeouf), the sister (played by Kristen Wiig), and two police officers (played by Fred Armisen and Jason Sudeikis). Two days after the sketch aired, the shooting at Virginia Tech happened, which was one of two reasons why the sketch never appeared on NBC's Saturday Night Live web page, which has video highlights of past and present sketches (the other reason being that NBC never cleared the copyright to the song used in the sketch). What a shame that everyone overreacted to a simple parody of The OC. As it was, the short became one of the first from the show's to be unofficially popularized on YouTube. Memetic Mutation followed; the Imogen Heap song which SNL couldn't get cleared has now been sampled for a hip-hop beat.
 * The SNL episode from season 35 hosted by Blake Lively from Gossip Girl had a Weekend Update segment where Abby Elliott plays a looped-out Brittany Murphy who thinks she's hosting SNL with musical guest Blink-182 (Quick note: Brittany Murphy actually did host SNL during its 28th season in 2002, only the musical guest was Nelly, not Blink-182). The Blake Lively episode aired on December 5th, 2009, fifteen days before the real Brittany Murphy would suddenly die of cardiac arrest. Because of this, Hulu.com pulled the video of this segment and the NBC TV rerun of this episode does not include this part.
 * Here's one that doesn't involve death, but still became controversial after the fact: On the Anne Hathaway/The Killers episode, there was a sketch about the assorted deadbeats and greedy people who would benefit from the economic bailout at the time. One of the people was a couple by the name of Herbert and Marion Sandler (played by long time cast member Darrell Hammond and 2-year feature player Casey Wilson), who screwed Wachovia Bank out of a lot of money and personally thanked the Congress for not holding them responsible for their corrupt activities. Who would have guessed that Herbert and Marion Sandler were an actual couple that actually did this (according to show creator Lorne Michaels, he and the other writers had no clue about this until after the sketch aired)? Because of this, the Internet video version of the CSPAN Bailout sketch and the NBC rerun of the Anne Hathaway episode edited out the entire part with the Sandler couple.
 * When Al Gore hosted a Christmas episode in season 28 (2002-2003), the monologue showed how Al Gore picked his running mate, rejecting John Kerry (Seth Meyers) and John Edwards (Will Forte). Gore then remarks that "one of them would make a great Vice President someday." Kerry and Edwards would team up to run for President and Vice-President in 2004, only to be beaten by Bush and Cheney (who were running for re-election).
 * A "Meet the Press" sketch on the episode hosted by Senator John McCain (the genuine article, not a cast member impersonation) in 2002 had McCain denying that he would run for President in 2004. McCain was right; he didn't run in 2004. The 2008 election was a different story, and, depending on your political leanings, the fact that McCain ran and lost is either an aneurysm moment or Hilarious in Hindsight.
 * Even the Jean Doumanian era isn't immune to the Funny Aneurysm Moment. At the end of the first episode (hosted by Elliot Gould), Gould introduces the cast again and tells the audience, "We're gonna be around forever!" Eleven episodes later, all but Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo were fired after the F-bomb debacle on the episode hosted by Charlene Tilton, and most of the cast members from that season have all but disappeared from the limelight (with the possible exception of Gilbert Gottfried).
 * Speaking of the Charlene Tilton episode, the whole "Who Shot C.R.?" running joke is a lot less funny, considering that Charles Rocket took his own life in 2005 (beating out Michael O'Donoghue as SNL's oldest deceased cast member; Rocket was 56 when he committed suicide) and SNL would later have a cast member who was shot in cold blood (Phil Hartman).
 * There's another problem with "We're gonna be around forever!" If you're a fan of the original 1970s SNL, the line comes across as a prediction/warning that SNL will never be canceled (no matter how often it's come close), but it will never be the same as the original.
 * From the late 1980s episode hosted by John Larroquette, there was a fake commercial for an album about an alcoholic country singer (played by Larroquette). Funny, right? Not after you realize that John Larroquette has struggled with alcohol abuse.
 * An in-sketch example: "The Carter 'N Sons Barbecue" fake commercial from the Taylor Swift episode, which was supposedly filmed in 2002 and didn't air until 2009, which was when the H1N1 ("swine flu") virus was much-talked-about. The "commercial" was plastered with disclaimers stating that "swine fever" (an appetite for Carter 'N Sons brand barbecued pork) wasn't associated with the H1N1 virus (followed by a disclaimer reading that the management regrets naming their Sausage and Ribs Sampler platter "S.A.R.S").
 * Speaking of SNL and the swine flu, a lot of the second season jokes and sketches about the swine flu outbreak in 1976 ceased being dated when round two showed up in the late 2000s -- still cringeworthy, but it should teach viewers that history tends to be cyclical -- i.e., something from the past will come back in a new era).
 * In the 1985-1986 season, there was an episode hosted by Pee-Wee Herman that had two (count 'em two) Aneurysm Moments:
 * The cold opening where Pee-Wee Herman performs a tightrope walk across the World Trade Center towers and falls, screaming the show's opening line. Thanks to the 9/11 attacks, whatever humor can be mined from this sketch has been tainted from tragedy (like everything else made before 2001 that shows New York City with the World Trade Center towers as part of the skyline).
 * Then, there was a sketch where Pee-Wee Herman is thrown in jail and meets the Pathological Liar, Tommy Flanagan (played by Jon Lovitz). Pee-Wee Herman (or rather, the actor who plays him [Paul Reubens]) would find himself on the wrong side of the law in the 1990s and early 2000s (both for sexual offenses). That Pee-Wee is screaming, "I'm innocent! I'm innocent!" adds to the cringe factor of rewatching this sketch.
 * The Christmas episode from season 28 (2002-2003 season): in the cold opening, Al Gore is worried when he can't find his wife, Tipper, then when he finds her, they kiss so long and so hard that it takes a taser for them to separate. It took eight years: on June 1, 2010, Al and Tipper announced their separation.
 * In the Colin Firth/Norah Jones episode from season 29, Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton remarks that John Edwards is like a "boring version" of himself, stating, "This guy might have sex in the Oval Office, but he’d probably do it in the missionary position - with his wife." Thanks to the Rielle Hunter affair and the sex tape scandal, that line rings hollow.
 * A sketch on the Topher Grace episode from season 30 (2004-2005 season) called "The Not Incredible Adventures of the Down-And-Out Dollar" parodies the fact that the U.S. dollar had reached an all-time low by having a tiny dollar bill (Amy Poehler) being mocked by currencies from other countries, one of which is a Euro (played by episode host, Topher Grace), who brags that he's doing well in every country in the European Union. That would prove to be so very false five years later with news of several European countries suffering from economic meltdown (what's worse is that the Euro mentions that Greece was doing better than America economically in 2005, which isn't true now).
 * Back in the early 80s, there was a show hosted by Drew Barrymore - fresh from ET the Extraterrestrial and Firestarter, all smiles and curls, and seven years old (making Barrymore the youngest host SNL has ever had, beating out Jodie Foster, who was 14 when she hosted in 1976) - who finished her monologue by asking for a drink. "After all," she declared with a broad wink, "I am a Barrymore." Her family legacy of alcoholism and self-destructive behavior would catch up with her for real, and in a big (bad) way, not long after. Subverted in that there is a happy ending to all of this: Drew Barrymore did manage to climb out of the same pit of drugs and despair as her ancestors did and has come back to host a few more times, now becoming SNL's most frequent female host as of October 2009.
 * In the SNL Digital Short on the Gwyneth Paltrow/Cee-Lo Green episode, Andy Samberg has a wild, drunken night out with Pee-Wee Herman (the same one who hosted SNL in 1985 during its 11th season -- it was really him, despite that the Jon Hamm/Rihanna episode from the same season had new feature player Taran Killam doing a dead-on Pee-Wee Herman impression in a sketch about 1980s actors auditioning for the first Back to The Future movie). During this night out, they break a chair over Anderson Cooper's head in the street (and Cooper comes back later in the short with a bandaged head, complaining that his Blue Eyes [which he considers one of America's national treasures] almost got destroyed). Less than three weeks after the sketch aired, Anderson Cooper really was brutalized in the streets during his coverage of Cairo's uprising.
 * In Jim Carrey's monologue on his second time hosting (in January 2011), he states that he loves hosting again, especially at this time, since 2012 may be the year that the world ends and that people should spend 2011 making the most of what they have. The aneurysm moment comes when he says, "When the earth opens up, so will new parking spaces." Two months after this episode aired, Japan's earth really did open up, thanks to that earthquake (and, no, there were no new parking spaces born from it).
 * Another Japan earthquake aneurysm moment: The Valentine's Day episode hosted by Russell Brand had a one-off sketch about proper British ladies (played by the very male Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, and Russell Brand) having a teatime talk show located on an island that was directly above a fault line that was sensitive to seismic activity (i.e., earthquakes). When the episode reran in March, the sketch was replaced with a movie trailer parody for Unstoppable (with Taran Killam as Chris Pine and Jay Pharoah as Denzel Washington).
 * A 1970s episode hosted by Steve Martin had a sketch called Jeopardy 1999. It was basically Jeopardy in a (then) futuristic setting. One of the answers was, "Comedian whose career fizzled when he left NBC's Saturday Night" The question: Who is Chevy Chase? While Chevy has currently found fame on the NBC sitcom Community, he did go through a career decline after leaving SNL, making that line eerily prophetic.
 * An early Monty Python sketch was a mock current affairs article about young men who fall into a culture of "mice" - people who dress up in mouse costumes and hang out acting like mice. At the time it may have been absurd and funny; nowadays, with furry culture (and, with it, the cosplay/"fursuit" subgroup) being common knowledge, the sketch feels oddly close to reality, and therefore there isn't really a joke anymore.
 * However, it was probably meant to be parodic of the backlash against homosexuals and other "deviant" cultures, but played in a ridiculously odd and unrecognizable manner. The fact that it now resembles a current source of moral panic debatably makes it Hilarious in Hindsight.
 * Mad TV did a parody of "The Anna Nicole Show" where it showed Anna Nicole Smith's son, Daniel (played by Josh Meyers, brother of SNL castmember Seth Meyers), being taken away from her (though on the sketch, it was by a social worker, not death), Howard K. Stern (played by Mad TV mainstay Michael McDonald) saying that he's only putting up with Anna because one day she'll be rich, and Anna Nicole (once again played by Stephanie Weir) slipping into a prescription pill-induced coma at the end of the sketch. Another Anna Nicole aneurysm moment happened in a parody of the Chanel No. 5 commercial which depicted Anna Nicole Smith as a washed-up sex symbol desperate for love and money who ends up dead (only in the sketch, she falls off a building).
 * Anna Nicole was also a frequent subject/target in Kathy Griffin's stand-up specials for Bravo, a few of which were pulled from repeat airings or reedited immediately after Smith's death. A particularly unfortunate example from 2004's Kathy Griffin: The D-List referred to Daniel: "You don't recover from your mother being Anna Nicole Smith. It's over. See you at Promises."
 * In possibly the fastest Funny Aneurysm in history, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show once summed up the American situation--failing economy, no strong political leadership--in two words: "We're doomed." The date was September 10th, 2001.
 * And later, in July of 2008, he joked that Robert Novak contains "the cure for the cure for cancer"... the week before he was discovered to have a massive brain tumor.
 * Rodney Dangerfield made a statement to his fan club before going into surgery saying "If all goes well, I will be out in a couple weeks. If not, a couple of hours." He would die from complications from that operation within a few weeks. Lightened by the fact that the statement was so typical of his style of humor, and that he might have thought the irony funny.
 * Bill Hicks on smoking in a stand-up routine: "I'll cough, I'll get the tumors, I'll die. Deal?" And, in 1988: "I do have this fear of doing smoking jokes and then coming back in five years and saying (with voice box buzz) 'Good evening everybody, y'all were right smoking's bad'" He died due to pancreatic cancer but considering all the carcinogens in tobacco the fact that it isn't lung cancer doesn't make the funny Aneurysm go away.
 * Doubly so in the version of the bit appearing on the Relentless DVD. Parodying a posthumously released public service announcement starring Yul Brynner, he announces "I'm Bill Hicks, and I'm dead now."
 * Wilfully obscure stand-up comedian Jerry Sadowitz made a few quips about Princess Diana in the mid 80's (recorded for posterity on his first album); one of which being how he wishes she quickly dies in a car pile-up.
 * This occurs in Mitch Hedberg's second (and last) stand-up album, Mitch All Together. One of Hedberg's jokes therein goes, "I drink a lot of red wine. This girl asks me, 'Doesn't that give you a headache?' I say, 'Yeah, eventually, but the first and the middle part are amazing.' I'm not going to stop doing something just because of what happens at the end. 'Hey, Mitch, do you want this apple?' 'No, eventually it'll be a core.'"
 * Very recently, a CD of an old performance of his, titled "Do You Believe In Gosh?" was released. It also has a cringe-inducing line. Mitch is receiving answers to his questions from a member of the audience before he asks them, (It Makes Sense in Context) when the following exchange takes place.

Mitch: Hey, Phil, which way is my career going?"


 * It doesn't help that through the whole thing, he's mentioning how he needs to practice more, so his next show will be better.
 * Most of his jokes about drugs headed straight into this after his death.
 * In Bill Cosby Himself, there's a whole bit that begins, "My son is 10 years old, and I don't think he's going to live to see 11..." and then details a plot by his sisters to kill him. Later in the same, there's a bit where his wife tells him to go upstairs "And kill that boy." Ennis Cosby was murdered on January 16th, 1997. One cringes every time one watches that part of the routine nowadays, though the rest still makes me die laughing every time.
 * In a particularly horrifying example, British magician and comedian Tommy Cooper had a heart attack and collapsed live on stage, being broadcast to millions across Britain. As this was not out of character for his act, the audience started laughing, before realising that it was serious. Watching his old acts and particularly scenes where he pretends to be shocked, in pain or surprised (often clutching his chest during it) now becomes very uncomfortable.
 * Sam Kinison had several:
 * He did a rant about how people overreacted to drinking and driving... later, his untimely death was caused by some drunk asshole crashing into his car. (To be fair, Kinison reportedly had drugs in his system at the time, making his advocacy of drug use a second Funny Aneurysm Moment.)
 * The "driving to Barstow" bit on Have You Seen Me Lately eerily echoes the time and place of Kinison's death, in a car crash in the California desert.
 * And his role in the Married... With Children It's A Wonderful Life parody as a wingless angel, who finally ascends after showing Al how happy everyone is in a world where he isn't born.
 * On one episode of Good News Week, Wil Anderson commented that people going around wearing Australian flags made them look like they were a bad superhero, Aussieman, joking that he wouldn't be useful: "Help, Aussieman, there's a fire!" "...nah, the cricket's on." The episode must have been prerecorded, but it aired the day after the worst natural disaster in Australian recorded history: a deadly bushfire. Dude Not Funny.
 * The ABC Radio News station began running weather and bushfire updates with "breaks for the cricket".
 * When you consider that comedian Richard Jeni was diagnosed with clinical depression and killed himself two years after his last HBO stand-up special... watching "A Big Steaming Pile of Me" is like watching an hour-long suicide note.
 * The troper remembers a story his parents told him about a show he did in Las Vegas. An older man up front had fallen asleep and Jeni had pointed him out and remarked "this is the guy I'll be thinking about when I put the gun to my head!"
 * Any of Victoria Wood's routines about life with her husband when viewed after their separation.
 * One of Gilda Radner's characters, Rhonda Wiess, is a stereotypical Long Island Jewish princess who is furious at the FDA for banning saccharine. The disturbing line, "statistics show men prefer skinny girls with cancer to healthy girls with bulging thighs," got a huge laugh during her one-woman show on Broadway. 10 years later, Gilda died at 42 of ovarian cancer.
 * On his album 222, Patton Oswalt does a bit where he says he'd like to go into suspended animation, then come out forty years later, and type "Michael Jackson" into Google, to find out all the weird things he's done in the interim.
 * Christopher Titus has based his stand-up routine almost entirely on the dysfunctional events of his life: "Norman Rockwell is Bleeding" centered on having a skirt-chasing, chain-smoking, functioning alcoholic father who was five-times-divorced and an extremely talented mom who was a manipulative, mentally ill, Ax Crazy alcoholic who often dated physically abusive men (except for Ken, who was emotionally abusive), dating women who were just as insane as his mother (one of which physically abused him), dealing with his mom's suicide, and finally finding love with a woman named Erin, who was the love of his life. "The 5th Annual End of the World Tour" continued with tales of Titus marrying Erin and having kids with her (and also included observations about how badly the world is falling apart following the 9/11 attacks and the story of how Titus's dad died and the bizarre plans for his funeral). "Love Is Evol," however, makes the first two comedy specials hard to watch, since it takes place a year after Titus is divorced from Erin (renamed "Kate" for legal reasons) and Titus just lays into how Erin was a manipulative bitch with a severely Dysfunctional Family who blew Titus's money on plastic surgery (including a set of Gag Boobs), cheated on him, nearly attacked him with a knife in front of his daughter, told him that he should kill himself like his mom and sister Shannon did (in Neverlution, Titus tells the audience that his sister killed herself after dating a man who kept breaking up with her), accused Titus of beating her and her kids just so she can get everything in the divorce (California is usually a "no-fault state," meaning that when couples divorce, they get half of everything, but in the case of domestic abuse, the spouse who claims domestic abuse gets everything the abuser has), nearly drove Titus to suicide, and made him lose faith in God for ruining his children's lives.
 * There is, however, some good in all of this, according to Neverlution and the second half of Love Is Evol: Titus is now dating a younger woman with a functional family (the dad is a former Marine pilot, the mom is a journalist, and the younger woman's siblings work at high-end government agencies, like the FBI and CIA, meaning that if Titus, "...pisses off this family, [he'll] be on the news.") meaning that God really did want Titus to divorce because He knew that Titus could do better, the court found that "Kate" was lying about Titus being abusive to her and the kids, so she didn't get all of his stuff (she did get an undisclosed amount in alimony -- Titus said in Neverlution that his divorce took five years to finalize and cost him $2 million, but it's not known how much went to his ex-wife and how much went to legal fees), and Titus has partial custody of his children.
 * The sitcom Titus also includes a series of flash-forwards on the episode "When I Say 'Jump'" showing Titus and Erin as an old married couple. The real Titus and Erin wouldn't be married long to be that old married couple.
 * That show is pretty packed with Titus/Erin FAMs, but perhaps the worst is the fact that it was eventually cancelled because an executive pulled all of the show's advertising out of spite after Titus refused to have them break up on the show. His main reason for refusing was that the show was based on his life, and that hadn't happened.
 * After The Chaser was pulled for two weeks following a particularly offensive sketch, the next show they aired showed them doing good things for the community, including: Closing Scientology down for good, getting rid of all the Andre Rieu CDs in the world, and Taking Kyle Sandilands off the air permanently. Four days later, this happens; three days after that... Although, most Australians would argue that this doesn't count as a Funny Aneurysm Moment, given the Mr. Sandilands... Personality
 * Parodied in The Whitest Kids U Know when a hunter attempts to make a joke about hunting accidents using his friend as a punch-line. The only problem? His friend died in a hunting accident just the other day. He insists that this makes it even funnier, while the other members of the hunting party are more reluctant to laugh.
 * In one of his eighties stand-up specials, Bobcat Goldthwait mentioned he was from Syracuse, New York, the same town as Tom Cruise, then joked, "I know what you're thinking. Something in the water?" obviously comparing himself to Cruise in the looks department. Almost twenty years later, Tommy jumped up and down on Oprah's couch and then went off on a rant about psychiatrists on The Today Show. Something in the water, indeed...
 * SCTV's famous CCCP1-Russian Television episode, in which the show is "taken over" by a Soviet broadcast, includes several sketches deriding Uzbeks, like a PSA about them being "the weak link in the great chain of socialism", a warning against giving them matches and the famous line "Uzbeks drank my battery fluid!" At the time race relations in the USSR were pretty peaceful and if any Russians saw that episode then they probably found the suggestion that Russians hate Uzbeks as something completely farcical. Nowadays it does not seem that unrealistic, since Uzbekistan is one of the largest sources of illegal immigrants to Russia, and people from Central Asia are now the primary targets for Russian neo-Nazi thugs.
 * In the 1960s impressionist Vaughn Meader recorded two comedy albums entitled "The First Family Vol. I" and "The First Family Vol. II" poking fun at then White House occupant JFK. When he was assassinated, nobody could bear to see Meader perform his act and all unsold copies of his records were destroyed and both albums remained out of print until the turn of the millennium (when they were released on CD).
 * All the drug addiction and suicide jokes directed at Greg Giraldo (which he was always a good sport about, even making a few himself) at the Comedy Central roasts are a lot more aneurysm-inducing now that he's died of a prescription pill OD.
 * In his very last roast, the one for David Hasselhoff, he joked that Hasselhoff's career and Bobby Kennedy both died on the floor of a hotel room. He ironically later joined them.
 * This troper just watched the Comedy Central roast of Joan Rivers, when Giraldo joked that, like one of Rivers' designed watches, 87-year-old guest Carl Reiner had "liver spots on the hands and is running out of time". Ouch...
 * Is this troper the only one who thinks Giraldo would have found it to be funny as hell that he died of an OD after all of the jokes about it? Honestly, I think he'd probably be a little pissed that his funeral wasn't a roast in and of itself. He just seemed like one of those "nothing is sacred, there is no line not worth crossing" comics. YMMV, but I feel like that would have been a fitting tribute.
 * In one of her stand-up specials, Kathy Griffin spoke of a running gag she did at a red carpet event in which she claimed Dakota Fanning was in rehab. She mentions that while deciding who would be the least likely celebrity to go, she decided she couldn't choose Lindsay Lohan, "because, tick-tock."
 * It's also hard to watch her in her earlier specials talk lovingly about her husband Matt, now that they've divorced.
 * Jason Cook in the emotionally charged climax to his stand-up show "Joy" does a list, the "5 worst things to happen to the Cook family" topped at #1 by his Dad's death to cancer. he then presents a new list: "5 people who should have died of cancer instead of my Dad" #2 was originally Jade Goody, who, during the tour, died of cancer. It was changed, but the audience is informed of this change, hence Liverpool making the list twice.
 * In one of the deleted scenes for The Original Kings of Comedy Bernie Mac discusses what it will be like after he dies,and jokes how everyone will be "pissed because there wasn't even a funeral." near the end of the monologue he becomes somewhat serious,and it becomes a genuine posthumous message to his loved ones.
 * Michael "Bully" Herbig is one of Germany's most successful comedians nowadays. He got the nickname before the phenomenon of bullying was widely discussed in Germany (at least, under this name, which is a loan word after all).
 * Redd Foxx spent years having fake heart attacks as a comedy bit on Sanford and Son, and guess what eventually ended up killing him? A fatal heart attack.
 * Tom Green's line of "if I get lucky/I'll get a disease!" from his 1999 novelty single "Lonely Swedish (Bum Bum Song)" came back to bite him big time when less than a year later, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, which abruptly ended his popular MTV comedy program. He was able to successfully beat the disease, but he admits to no longer finding that line funny anymore.
 * In what could possibly be the fastest turnaround from joke to tragedy, Jay Leno joked about "driving dangerously" in his opening speech at the Love Ride motorcycle rally in 2011, defying the event's long-running record for lack of accidents... approximately one hour before two riders crashed into a truck and perished.
 * Amy Schumer on the Comedy Central roast of Charlie Sheen was already a Dude Not Funny with a joke about people wishing Steve-O died instead of Ryan Dunn, but It Got Worse with a joke about Patrice O'Neal. "Tonight is not just the roast of Charlie Sheen, it's also a farewell party to Patrice's foot". He died of a diabetes-related stroke two months later.
 * Actually, all the jokes about Patrice O'Neal suffering from diabetes due to bad dieting that were featured on that special ended up being in bad taste after he died (much like all the jokes about Greg Giraldo being a self-destructive drug addict who will never be famous for his comedy).
 * In 1990, Brazilian magazine Casseta Popular (whose members would be part of the comedy group Casseta & Planeta) did a satirical analysis of each team/country on the upcoming FIFA World Cup. Yugoslavia's one said there was no joke to be told as it was an unremarkable and "meh" country. One year later...