Stupid Deaths: Madame Blanchard

The Stupid Deaths panel is in party mode, with balloons, party hats and a birthday cupcake for one of the skeleton judges, when contestant 1819 introduces herself in French as Madame Blanchard and Death eagerly tries out the only French phrase he knows. She explains that her husband Jean-Pierre was the famous balloonist who first crossed the Channel by balloon in 1785, and that she herself became the first woman to fly balloons professionally. While Death fiddles with a party balloon and shrugs off a warning about helium, she describes an 1819 ascent over Paris where, hoping to give the crowd an unforgettable sight, she let off fireworks high in the air. One of them ignited the gas in her balloon. Death collapses into laughter, delivers a string of puns about her ending up flat, and waves her through to the afterlife with a warning about the drop on the way out.

Madame Blanchard's contestant number, 1819, is the year she died. On 6 July 1819, during an exhibition at the Tivoli Gardens in Paris, fireworks she launched ignited the hydrogen in her balloon; caught in its netting, she fell onto a roof on the Rue de Provence and then into the street, becoming the first woman to die in an aviation accident.