Photo credit Jeff Leard

First presented at the Circus of the Stars at the London Fringe Festival. The closest thing to standup you’re likely to get from me. Good-naturedly inspired by and dedicated to the folks who told me they weren’t coming to Paleoncology because they didn’t want to be sad in public.

Hi everyone. I’m Kira Hall, of Moon Dinosaur Theatre’s Paleoncology, and I think there’s an idea out there that I’m a big downer, all doom and gloom, because I do a show about death. I don’t think that’s true. I think I am funny. I think I can be very funny. So I thought I would do something funny for you, because everyone likes things that are funny, and by studying David Letterman and the internet I’ve figured out that lists of things can be a very effective route to comedy. So, here’s my top ten list of reasons why it’s okay that we’re all going to die.

Number Ten: You’re making room on the planet for somebody new coming into it. Who knows, they might even live a better life than you. Maybe they’ll be a doctor.

Number Nine: You’ve been meaning to catch up on your sleep anyway. Ha ha! Except you can’t really sleep because your body has ceased to function.

Number Eight: If you get buried in one of those earth pods or biodegradable urns, you’re giving nutrient-rich material back to the earth and your body-compost could help grow a tree or something cool. Unless you get buried in a coffin, because I guess people still do that?

Number Seven: At the last minute, you can turn to someone and say, “There’s something I always wanted to tell you,” and then you can die, and you’ve pranked them with the burden of ignorance for the rest of their life.

Number Six: Did you guys see Underneath the Lintel? It’s partially about a guy who is doomed to live forever, or at least until the second coming of Christ. And he’s forbidden to sit down. I don’t care whether or not you inspire delightful adventures for an obsessive librarian, living forever sounds like it sucks.

Number Five: The brain’s dying synapses and misfires will probably create the illusion of whatever post-death scenario you’ve envisioned for yourself, so that will be nice for you.

Number Four: Somebody else can take your organs so that they can live, and a little bit of you can live on inside them! And if this happens when you’re dead it is so much less weird.

Number Three: With any luck, everyone in this room will die before the weather gets even nastier and deadlier, and not just in Thailand or the Arctic but in the comfy parts of North America, and the sixth mass biological extinction event that we’re tipping into really screws up global biodiversity, and great swaths of human life on the planet start to die really unpleasant deaths. They’ll be so jealous that they didn’t just get hit by a bus while there was still fossil fuel to run buses on. Suckers.

Number Two: You will never have to flyer a Fringe lineup on closing weekend ever again.

Number One: It’s nice to have something in common with other people.