Irish man hilariously pranks his family at his own funeral

It was the man's dying wish.
By Ellie Houghtaling  on 

Funerals are some of the most heartbreaking experiences we go through as humans, but every so often we get a beautiful chance to merge the tragedy with a laughter that eases the tension.

Shay Bradley of Kilnamanagh in the south of Dublin, Ireland, passed October 8, but that didn't mean he was ready to give up his life's passion of pranking his family. When his coffin was lowered and the bag pipes began playing, something unusual happened – an audio recording of his voice began playing.

"Hello? Hello," starts Bradley's voice to everyone's astonishment. "Let me out, it's fucking dark in here!"

Pretty quickly the crowd's tears turn to laughter as the recording mimics Bradley knocking on the wooden coffin.

Bradley's daughter, Andrea Bradley, posted the video to Facebook. "My dad's [dying] wish, always the pranksters, ya got them good Poppabear 😉 and gave us all a laugh just when we needed it!! I will love you forever 😘😘#shayslastlaugh."

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"He would love to know how many people he made laugh!!! He was an amazing character," Andrea wrote on Twitter.

At the end of the video, you can hear Bradley serenading his loving family one last time.

"We were very close, he was my best buddy," Chloe Kiernan, Bradley's granddaughter, told Mashable.

Kiernan said that Bradley was concerned about scaring the younger ones, so his grandchildren and his wife were in on the joke. "Everyone else was shocked when [they] first heard it," said Kiernan.

"Everyone else thought it was real and you could hear 'is that Shay is that Shay' but gradually as things went on people [realized] he had prerecorded and everyone (apart from the priest and woman beside him) were in hysterics," Kiernan told Mashable. "It was beautiful to hear his voice and it just made me happy as that was him, so funny and always making others laugh, he’s such a bright character, he would be loving this right now."


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