Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

Beerbohm’s wry observation turns on the gap between a familiar idiom (“to die of laughter”) and the historical record. By noting that no one is actually remembered as having died laughing, he punctures the hyperbole we use to describe amusement and hints at the comparative rarity—or at least the poor documentation—of joy’s most extreme consequences. The line also reflects Beerbohm’s characteristic Edwardian skepticism: he treats a commonplace phrase as a philosophical problem, inviting readers to consider how language manufactures “facts” that life and history do not corroborate. Implicitly, it suggests that tragedy is more readily recorded and mythologized than comic excess, and that laughter, however intense, is culturally framed as survivable.