Gallows humour is generally recognised as poking fun at a life-threatening or disastrous situation. A coping mechanism of laughing in the face of death. The literal translation of laughing as you are being hanged takes a bit of swallowing: try giggling with your neck broken and your body swinging above the pit. It ain't easy, folks. Still, many believe that the term originates with the seventeenth century wandering minstrel turned highwayman, Valentino Dick. This dashing crooner had a devoted female following across the south east of England, even when he was relieving them of jewellery, lace and petticoats. Crowds were reportedly left in stitches by his running commentary on husbandry practices in rural outposts. "I'm going to a better place and it sure as hell ain't Guildford" is one of Dick's surviving quips. His quick wits and roving eye helped him charm his way down off the scaffold on several occasions, usually with the help of the local lady of the manor ordering clemency and offering solace. His eventual demise, though, came in Little Snoring. Typically, most of the townsfolk were asleep that day and the hangman had been rendered hard of hearing following a beating by Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins. If you tell a joke and nobody hears it, even gallows humour won't save your hide. Swing low, sweet chat up lines…

Williams Burke and Hare were serial killers operating in Edinburgh during 1827 and 1828. They sold the bodies of their victims to Doctor Robert Knox so that the latter could advance the study of human anatomy. Recent research has suggested a different angle, though. Mary Shelley's classic Gothic novel Frankenstein was first published in 1818 and these two reprobates were actually massive fans who sought, somewhat unscientifically, to recreate scenes from the book. The modern cosplay community has the two Willies down as originators of their performance art form.

Grave-robbing has become more acceptable these days with the ubiquity of the organ donor card. Apparently, after death, doctors can find uses for my heart, liver, kidney, lungs, corneas, middle ear and intestines. Blimey, if all that lot are still functioning, you should probably check whether I'm really dead.

The Covid pandemic has hastened the ubiquity of credit cards and a cashless society. But be aware, all those of you headed for the River Styx tonight or tomorrow: our old friend Charon has not succumbed to the digitisation of commerce. No coins, no passage. Them's the rules, don't blame me I don't make them, only implement them.

*

Those who have briefly "died" claim to have seen a white tunnel; but what did humans see before there were tunnels - and even perhaps before the concept of "white" or any other pigmentation? Did the dinosaurs see a corridor of giant fern leaves with maybe a smoking volcano in the distance?

Hell is an actual planet and has been established longer than Heaven. In fact, its location has been moved several times. Discussions are in place to move it again, this time to the convenient and frankly hellish location of Venus. The implied link with sex via the nomenclature of the one-time goddess of love has a certain ironic appeal.

Sartre described hell as other people. David Byrne of much-missed band Talking Heads sang of heaven as being somewhere that nothing ever happens. Given this paucity of options, many of us are trying to stay alive as long as possible - even with the various threats of Covid, climate, Putin and the cost of living crisis.

In fact, it is likely that none of us is going to heaven anymore. On a quiet Friday when our attention was taken up with more immediately pressing matters, they snuck in some legislation tightening the entry requirements. Have you inadvertently upset someone with a social media post or comment? Then you're fucked. Never mind the accompanying laugh emoji or trio of exclamation marks or the fact that even a five year old would know you were being facetious…

I upset a bunch of writers by boldly posting: "I've never feared zombies. The whole mythos has always felt somewhat ridiculous. Shambling forwards with whatever body parts they still possess. Wanting to eat your brain to fill their non-functioning and probably atrophied guts. Friends, relations, lovers all suddenly turned into resolute, unkillable enemies." But then I start thinking about what if Auntie Tilda came back in search of that Georgian silver service I inherited and sold? Or Queen Victoria rises from her mausoleum and sets about bumping off all her royal offspring across the continent. Even HM King Charles is not immune to Vicky's black widow robes ire. And all Queen Vic's reincarnated subjects follow suit, reclaiming anything inherited or simply in use. They want our houses, our land, our inventions, our society. Our bank accounts. Then they're going to restore Empire, as in "Make Britannia Great Again". A slogan embroidered with silk thread just above the rim of the top hat. I never used to fear zombies but maybe I should. I ought to apologise on Facebook or Insta or Twit Tock but the damage has already been done and I've been cancelled by the army of the living dead…

Desperately unsuccessful, I need to cling to a life-raft that my fiction will catch fire after my passing. Like Kafka, my posthumous career and influence would be huge and significant. But these days I think: After I'm dead, no-one will publish me. Back to the gallows humour: Nobody wants to publish me while I'm still alive, so my spirit self really won't notice the difference.

*

You think brains in jars is just a science fiction concept but actually the first experiments to preserve our scientific geniuses began many decades ago. The prevailing wisdom is that the oxygenated preserving fluid in the plexiglass containers may have had a little too much alcoholic content. This led the great minds to become fixated on tautologies rather than be engaged in intellectual unity to consider the great questions of the age. Imagine Einstein, Oppenheimer, Turing et al bickering in the bubbles:

"I'm struggling to see what you mean, Albert."

"The reason you're struggling to see, Rob, is that in this tank you don't have any eyes."

"Oh shut up, you pair of speccy twats."

*

It's too horrible to think of death as the absolute end. So you make a pact with close friends and family to meet up again in the afterlife. You know, many years from now when we've all had a good spell upon the Earth and led a fulfilling life from which we've now all departed. So there's this place - I mean, it's not really a place in the absolutist quotidian physical world sense. Let's call it The Gallows Café. No, they don't serve cappuccinos or soy latte or baguettes with chips. Why would they? You don't take your stomach into the next life, the NHS has donated it without your consent.

Whatever: you turn up at the appointed time hoping to reconnect with everyone in that non-corporeal fashion. But Carly is off seeking out a mysterious Auntie who scandalised her family some time after "the war". Jacko was always a rubbish timekeeper and has got the day / the hour / the venue mixed up. Pratesh and Sunita - despite suffering debilitating bouts of malaria, Covid and cancer scares over the years - turn out to have not even died yet. Which leaves just you and Bobbie, who was always the quietest and least interesting of your regular social group. So you exchange a few pleasantries and share a couple of memories - telepathically, your floaty essence doesn't possess vocal cords - then you fall to silence and stillness. You're stuck in this place. Nothing is going to happen. It's like one of those office work functions you felt compelled to attend but which always bored you to tears.

There are no tears in the afterlife. No other bodily functions, either.

The Gallows Café has a neat hanging sign, though - enamel, metal chain, suspended from wood. Probably imported from the home planet, somehow. You reach out to touch but your hand - or what would have been your hand - passes right through.

There are very few employment opportunities in the afterlife. Angels are immortal so no vacancies there any time soon. All the skills and expertise you might have acquired and/or applied back in the world of the living are entirely redundant here. There are no farmers, truck drivers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, leather tanners or call centre operatives. Many people try their hand at philosophy but it's an overcrowded market. If an influencer has no audience and no means with which to dispel their opinions and endorsements, have they then succumbed to the dreaded fate of becoming a non-entity? And will anyone even notice?

Perhaps the most popular example of gallows humour is Eric Idle on a crucifix singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" at the close of the Monty Python film Life of Brian. There was a joke that amused me in my younger days although now I recognise its snobbish and frankly racist intent. This guy, let's call him "M", is sentenced to death by guillotine. The blade doesn't fully descend. They try again. Still no cut. Three's the charm so if he survives the next one they'll have to let him go. M turns from his prone position, smiles at his would-be executioners and says something like, "I'm an engineer by trade. Let me show you what the problem is…"

The dead won't stay dead. Everybody famous is being revived. There's a phone app that makes your late grandfather move his head and shoulders in that black and white photo you uploaded. Creepy doesn't cover it. Everybody's duetting with dead people. Orchestras are stringing along with Elvis, Roy Orbison, Bob Marley, Judy Garland… You're fifty or a hundred rows back, you can't really make out details on the stage, only video back projection so it's all much the same to much of the audience. Then there's so-called "Ghostbot" technology. In October 2020, Kanye West gave his then wife Kim Kardashian a singing and chatting hologram of her late father as a special birthday present. Why, thank you very much, Baron Frankenstein, how thoughtful of you. Could you also revive Mussolini, Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi as they're the ones missing from my Panini twentieth century icons living statues collection?

These days, death is normally recognised as occurring when the brain ceases to function. Headless chickens are the exception that proves this rule.

It has long been known that human hair and nails can continue to grow long after death. Hair, nails and, indeed, rhino horn are essentially varieties of the same substance: keratin. I would like to see a survey conducted in which the deceased's previous lifestyle was logged and correlated against the post-death growth. The sort of article you get click-baited onto when logging out from MSN. I would read this survey with interest; then draw my own conclusions and never consider it again.

Undertakers speak vividly of the case of Miss Hannah Wonacott. Her luscious golden locks and curved nails grew so swiftly and profusely after her demise that cracks occurred in the side of  her coffin and the lid itself was prised open from the inside by the insidious harvest. One eyewitness described her corpse as "finely but heavily haired like an exotic fruit, a Home Counties coconut". Many have posited the theory that Hannah was the inspiration for the character Cousin It in The Addams Family.  No real proof has ever been offered for this apocryphal tale but modern politics and social media lore tell us that if enough folks swallow this codswallop then, effectively, the story is true. Like everything else in this world and the next.

~
Post-Mortem Script
You know me, I just sit here and make up all this shit for my own entertainment. But "Ghostbot" and Kanye and Kim are real. Click on: