Life & Mortality Quote by Joseph Epstein

Epstein’s line is a deadpan flirtation with catastrophe: it treats death not as the grand moral climax literature often demands, but as an occupational hazard of paying too much attention. The wit lands because it’s calibrated, not cartoonish. “I should prefer” has the manners of an essayist, the voice of someone who can’t help polishing even a morbid thought. Then he swerves: “on more than one occasion” implies a repeatable, almost procedural experience. This isn’t a single epiphany; it’s a recurring brush with a punchline so sharp it threatens to take him out.

The subtext is a creed about dignity and control. Choosing to “die laughing” is a fantasy of authorship over your own ending: if you can make the last moment comic, you’ve refused the universe its preferred genre (tragedy). Epstein also sneaks in a defense of his sensibility. If he’s nearly died laughing, the laugh must be earned - the world, in his telling, really is that absurd. It’s self-mythologizing in the modest-key: not “I am fearless,” but “I have been undone by amusement.”

Contextually, it fits an American essay tradition that uses humor as both scalpel and shield. Epstein’s comedy isn’t escape; it’s appraisal. The line suggests that the mind’s best rebellion against decline, disappointment, and the body’s eventual veto is to keep finding things ridiculous - and to treat that refusal as a kind of victory.