According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two! Does that sound right? That means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.

This line is a well-known Jerry Seinfeld stand-up bit from his late-1980s/early-1990s era, built around a frequently cited survey claim that public speaking outranks death as a common fear. Seinfeld uses the “studies say” premise as a comic springboard, escalating from mock disbelief (“Death is number two!”) to a darkly absurd funeral scenario in which the living would rather be dead than deliver a eulogy. The joke exemplifies his observational style: taking a familiar statistic, treating it literally, and pushing it to an extreme to expose the irrationality of everyday anxieties.

Seinfeld’s point is not a literal ranking of fears but a comic diagnosis of social anxiety. Public speaking represents exposure to judgment—being watched, evaluated, and possibly humiliated—while death is abstract and, for most people, not immediately present. By imagining a funeral where the speaker envies the corpse, the joke dramatizes how embarrassment can feel more urgent than existential threats. The humor comes from incongruity (preferring the casket) and from recognizing a truth about modern self-consciousness: many people experience social evaluation as a kind of symbolic death, a threat to identity and status.

1) “According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death… That means to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
2) “Public speaking is the number one fear. Death is number two. So if you’re at a funeral, you’d rather be the guy in the box than the guy giving the speech.”
3) “People fear public speaking more than death. That’s why at a funeral most people would rather be in the coffin than up front talking.”