Moral? Go out with a bang and a good joke:
The cake can be even tastier when the object of these posthumous
putdowns is famous, like Nixon, and, also like him, not universally
venerated. “Joe McCarthy’s death,” Daniel Boorstin growled at Arthur
Herman, “isn’t that the fifth proof of the existence of God?”
In one of the wickedest and choicest bits of repartee from the famously
no-holds-barred Algonquin Round Table crowd, Robert Benchley informed
Dorothy Parker of the death of the legendarily taciturn Calvin Coolidge:
Parker: How could they tell?
Benchley: He had an erection.
The shock value of what might be called death humor can be heightened
by a number of factors, including the public profile of the jokester.
Parker and Benchley were notoriously ruthless wits with surgical
scalpels for tongues, but what of Red Skelton, the gentle former
vaudevillian who ended each episode of his long-running comedy sketch
show with the platitude “May God bless”?