If death can be a funny sort of philosophical thing when you think about it — and it can, just ask author Simon Critchley — would that mean it gets funnier the more you think about it? And if you were a philosopher who spent most of your life thinking about its meaning, would that make your death funny?

Deep thinker Heraclitus of ancient Greece fame had himself covered in cow dung as a medicinal cure (you've got to wonder what ailment was worse), but alas, he suffocated in the stuff.

Sigmund Freud, who famously observed that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, failed to note they were bad for you, smoked up to 20 each day and died of cancer of the mouth.

These and other endings are the stuff of "The Book of Dead Philosophers," Critchley's ironic take on 3,000 years of philosophy and the demises of 190 of its greatest practitioners. It's a lot funnier than you'd think, in a Monty Python, "They're throwing cows at us!" kind of way. It's also strange, absurd, sad and bizarre, which makes it a lot like life.

Critchley, chairman of the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research in New York, worries that Western societies are coming unglued. New Age muddles, televangelists promising salvation after a tax-free donation, kitsch Buddhism, endless quests to find "self-meaning": All this metaphysical scrambling betrays a "profound terror of death and an overwhelming anxiety to be quite sure that death is not the end but the passage to the afterlife," he writes.

Philosophically speaking, this is not good. Philosophically speaking, you want to come to terms with the fact that, while reading this sentence, you just cashed in three seconds of the only life you'll ever live.

But by looking at the deaths (and lives, briefly) of the great philosophers, Critchley figures that our youth-worshipping, death-fearing society might buck up about our mortality. After all, philosophers should know something about facing death. Cicero observed that "to philosophize is to learn how to die," and Michel de Montaigne had it that "He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live."

Montaigne, the hugely influential essayist of the French Renaissance, wrote in his autobiography that he wanted to die quietly. He died in 1592 of abscesses in his throat grown so large that they cut off his ability to speak.

His brother died after being hit in the head by a tennis ball.

"I suppose I was always interested in gallows humor," Critchley says by phone. He quotes a favorite story of Freud's that defines the term. A condemned man is taken into the courtyard at dawn. The gallows await. Guy looks up, it's a beautiful morning. Sunshine, blue skies, warm breeze. Guy says, "Why, the week is beginning so nicely."

"The humor in that is stepping outside yourself in order to find yourself ridiculous," he says. "It's sort of pessimistic humor, but it's ultimately affirmative."

Critchley, a Brit, wrote the book while on a Getty fellowship in Los Angeles. He was living on West Sunset Boulevard, smack in the middle of the city of sunshine, spritz and American youth worship. He hated it.

"I lived most of the time at night, going to supermarket and getting cereal."

In between, he was carrying out Herculean periods of reading and research across 30 centuries of worldwide thought. He penned short profiles of each philosopher, distilling their worldviews in a few paragraphs or pages, then spiking it with the punch line of their passing.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher who famously opined that "God is dead," died of syphilis after a "long, soft-brained and dribbling descent into oblivion."

Austria's Ludwig Wittgenstein was, in many eyes, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. On his deathbed in 1951, a  lady friend presented him with an electric blanket for his birthday and thoughtlessly added, "Many happy returns!"

"There will be no returns," he said. He died three days later.