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20 Historic Events Even the Movies Won’t Touch

Khalid Elhassan July 28, 2019 23 min

11. The King Who Died Laughing at a Lame Joke

Martin of Aragon. Real Cartuja de Valldemossa

King Martin I of Aragon (1356 – 1410) reportedly died shortly after consuming an entire goose. Something about the fowl was foul and did not agree with him, and gave the king indigestion. So he retired to his chamber and summoned his court jester, who took his time in arriving. When he finally showed up, Martin asked him where he had been, and the jester replied: “in the next vineyard, your majesty, where I saw a young deer hanging by his tail from a tree, as if somebody had punished him for stealing figs“.

Something about that joke and the image it evoked struck the king as extremely funny. It seems that while some jokes are timeless, many others are time and culture-sensitive, and in the 15th century Aragon, deer hanging by the tail as punishment for theft were considered to be super funny. So funny, in Martin of Aragon’s case, that he laughed uncontrollably for three hours nonstop, until he finally fell out of the bed and hit the floor, dead as a doorknob.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.