Stupid Deaths: Ivan the Terrible

In the afterlife's waiting room, a well-fed Death and his two skeleton judges call up contestant number 1584, Tsar Ivan the Terrible of Russia. Asked what earned his nickname, Ivan proudly lists his cruelties, from blinding the architects of St Basil's Cathedral so they could never build anything finer, to having an archbishop sewn into a bearskin and hunted by dogs, to punishing a jester who failed to amuse him. A queasy Death agrees he is officially terrible and guesses at a suitably gruesome end, but Ivan reveals he simply died during a game of chess. Death mocks the anticlimax with a dead-heat pun, shrugs off Ivan's threats because he is already dead, and waves the tsar through to the afterlife.

Ivan's contestant number, 1584, is the year he died; the real tsar died of a stroke while playing chess with Bogdan Belsky on 28 March 1584. The claim that he blinded the architects of St Basil's Cathedral repeats a story that many historians consider a myth.