LA - A charter boat crew member choked to death after swallowing a bait fish as a joke in front of elementary schoolchildren during a field trip to the Port of Long Beach, authorities said Wednesday. Jeff Twaddle, 54, of Huntington Beach, "was trying to be lighthearted when he put this thing in his mouth" on Friday, said Long Beach Fire Department Chief Frank Hayes. "But it became an airway obstruction, and he lost consciousness and went into full cardiac arrest."

I've been struggling with this story for hours now. Not that I'm above laughing at someone else's death, mind you. The death rate is still 100% and not all of us get to check out by yelling "FreeeeDOM!" while the whole village weeps. If I meet my demise like one of the hundreds each year who get killed by having a vending machine fall on them, I fully expect people will get a good chuckle over it. But I'm not so sure Jeff Twaddle qualifies. I admit that choking on a bait fish is pretty funny, but he was doing it to make a bunch of kids laugh, not to win a bet or impress his idiot buddies in a bar. Still you've got to appreciate it for the irony. A professional fisherman choking on the very bait fish he's used to kill hundreds of fish is the stuff an ichthylogical O. Henry would've come up with. To a fish, it's probably like one of those stories you hear about a terrorist blowing himself up making bombs or something. I guess in the end this is more tragic than funny. But Twaddle didn't die in vain. A coward dies a milliong deaths, but a man who'll put a fish in his mouth to entertain a bunch of elementary school kids dies but once. Still, this is sad. If a prop comic were going to die young, why couldn't it have been Carrot Top?