What does “morire dalle risate” mean in Italian?

Italian doesn’t laugh its head off, it dies of laughing: morire dalle risate. Watch the preposition — da, not di. Morire di fame is what happens in a famine; morire dalla fame is what happens when lunch is late. That little da is the marker of exaggeration, and it runs through the whole family: morire dal ridere, morire dal caldo, tremare dalla paura.

The clip milks the idiom for one beat of suspense. The clown tells a roomful of children he’s just come from another party where “si sono divertiti tutti… sono morti.” Pause. “Morti dalle risate.” The gap between the literal and the idiomatic reading is where the joke lives. Morto dal ridere is just as common, and da keeps the same job in scoppiare dalle risate, “to burst out laughing.”