Meaning
Chiefly British theatrical slang for breaking into uncontrollable laughter while performing, at a moment that demands a straight face; also used transitively for deliberately making a fellow performer laugh. Now applied to live television, podcasts and comedy sets as well as the stage. Informal insider slang; affectionate rather than damning, especially when fans describe a favourite blooper. Regional use: British English (theatrical origin).
Origin
The underlying verb is 'to corpse'. The explanation given consistently across references (Wikipedia's article on breaking character, Merriam-Webster's theatre-vocabulary column and the radio show A Way with Words) is that the archetypal failure was an actor playing a corpse on stage, a role demanding total stillness, who could not suppress a giggle; such an actor was said to have corpsed, and the word spread to any onstage loss of composure. Wikipedia adds an American reading of the same image: breaking character kills the character, reducing it to a corpse. Dated citations are surprisingly recent, with Wiktionary's earliest being Kenneth Branagh's 1989 memoir and novels of 1993, and no source verified here pins a first attestation, so the slang is almost certainly older than its paper trail; it is characterized simply as British theatre slang. American performers describe the same mishap as 'breaking'.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- corpse someone
- corpsed
- to corpse
Usage Examples
- Halfway through the eulogy scene the two leads started corpsing, and the audience loved every second of it.
- She is famous for corpsing on live television; compilations of her giggling fits have millions of views.
- Don't look at me during the courtroom scene, you know I am hopeless once the corpsing starts.