Tickled To Death?

[Bartmanhomer]

This may sound very strange but can a characther died from tickling? For example, If the victim is immobilized by a torture rack and the torturer tickle the victim feet with a feather.

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

I suggest this article:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_207.html

My questions are: (a) Why are some people ticklish and others not? (b) Is it true the Chinese used tickling as torture? (c) Can you actually tickle someone to death? (d) If so, how would death result? --W.L.M., Chicago
Dear W.:

Precious little serious research has been done on this topic, W., meaning that the following is going to consist of about 1 part fact to 20 parts harebrained speculation. So what else is new?

The physical mechanism of tickling is not well understood (it's thought to be associated with the sense of pressure in some way). Nor is it known why some people are more ticklish than others.

Nonetheless, it's clear that tickling is no mere idle diversion. Rather, it's a profoundly ambiguous act fraught with numerous mundo bizarro psychosexual implications. No jive.

Consider, for instance, that you cannot tickle yourself. According to Darwin, this is because "the precise point to be tickled must not be known," lest some sort of mental tickle-canceling mechanism be automatically invoked.

From this we deduce not only that it takes two to tickle, but that the tickling sensation is associated with a loss of control over the relationship.

Furthermore, consider the fine line between pleasure and pain that tickling entails. You entertain babies by tickling them, but your girlfriend is making you suffer by causing you to enjoy yourself (i.e., laugh) too much.

Can you literally be tickled to death? Maybe. According to researcher Joost Meerloo, who wrote a monograph on laughter some years ago, it's possible to die laughing.

Epidemics of laughing, a type of mass hysteria, have been noted since the Middle Ages, and similar episodes are occasionally reported in the medical literature today. For instance, 1,000 people in Tanganyika suffered a mass laughing fit lasting several days in 1963.

Most of the victims of laughing fits recover. But some die from a combination of starvation and exhaustion. You can't eat or sleep while laughing, and we all know if you try to drink it just sprays out your nose.

As for being tickled to death, Meerloo offers a possibly apocryphal story about a sadistic method of torture devised by the Romans (and for all I know, used by the Chinese as well).

The victim is strapped to a scaffold and his feet are dipped in a salt solution. Then a goat, attracted by the salt, licks the victim's feet with its raspy tongue. This drives the poor sap nuts with laughter and gradually abrades away the skin at the same time.

The feet are then recoated with salt and the process resumes. Finally the victim, having suffered unimaginable agonies, dies horribly.

However, according to Meerloo, the more important meaning of being "tickled to death" is not real death but metaphorical death--i.e., sexual surrender.

[part edited out. had to do with sex.]

--CECIL ADAMS

 

[tetsujin28]

If you're being tickled by a nightgaunt, it can be pretty deadly.

 

[Crothian]

this is how the Flumph kills you

 

[Nifft]

A wraith hiding in a whoopie cushion, with a sadistic tickle fettish. Now that's funny.

-- N

 

[Nuclear Platypus]

I'm pretty sure it was those "Strange But True Facts" type books but I could've sworn there was some culture that was humane in their executions since they tickled the prisoner to death (by asphixiation).

 

[I'm A Banana]

I like the idea of massive fits of laughter that rip through a community....

And I imagine that because laughing makes your breathing all screwed up funny, you could probably pass out, or perhaps get a bit overloaded on soemthing...

So now I have this idea of a laughing disease.......hmmmm.....

 

[Bran Blackbyrd]

Die from being tickled?
Sounds like you'd be experiencing some uncontrollable and rather hideous laughter.

 

[Bartmanhomer]

Tickle torture doesn't really sound that evil. It's too funny!

 

[Gospog]

In one of our Deadlands games, a PC was spanked to death by his own midget.

The midget was being mentally controlled by Fungi from Yuggoth.

It was just all-around ugly.