It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

This line is a characteristic Woody Allen one-liner from his early stand-up and comic writing period, when he frequently built routines around anxiety, mortality, and Jewish-inflected neurotic humor. It circulated widely in print collections of his jokes and in recordings of his nightclub performances, becoming one of his best-known quips about death. The joke’s setup—disavowing fear of death—mirrors the tone of mid‑20th‑century observational comedy, but Allen’s twist turns a philosophical topic into a practical, self-protective preference, underscoring the persona he cultivated: articulate, worried, and comically self-aware about existential dread.

The humor hinges on a logical dodge: the speaker claims not to fear death in principle, yet admits a very human fear of the experience of dying. By separating “death” (an abstract state) from “being there when it happens” (the embodied event), the line satirizes philosophical bravado and exposes how anxiety often attaches to suffering, uncertainty, and loss of agency rather than to nonexistence itself. It also reflects Allen’s characteristic blend of existential dread and comic deflation—treating the ultimate subject with a shrugging, practical complaint. The quip’s durability comes from its concise way of voicing a common, rarely articulated distinction.

1) “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
2) “I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”