Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday In Tombstone Has The Best Dying Words In Western History

The Western movie Tombstone is full of some of the best quotes in any movie, regardless of genre. Val Kilmer has some of the best quotes in the movie, playing Doc Holliday. While Doc has some of the movie's most repeatable quotes, one of his better ones is rarely mentioned. That is likely because people love it when he is acting like a tough guy or being overly sarcastic, and this quote comes at the end of the movie as he dies.

When Tombstone begins, the Earp brothers arrive in Tombstone, Arizona, to retire from their careers as lawmen. They then find their old friend Doc Holliday there. Doc suffers from tuberculosis, which is getting worse, and he relocates to Tombstone to relieve his affliction thanks to the dry climate. However, none of them gets to enjoy retirement or to relieve themselves of their illness. Instead, a war with outlaws terrorizing the town pulls them in.

By the time Tombstone ends, Wyatt Earp has killed Curly Bill, the leader of the evil Cowboys, and Doc Holliday has gunned down Johnny Ringo, the best gunfighter in the Cowboys. While the good guys win the fight, things do not end well because tuberculosis is killing Doc. He is sent to a sanatorium, and he delivers a last one-liner before he dies.

Doc Holliday's "This Is Funny" Quote In Tombstone Explained

The last lines that Doc Holliday says when he is lying in bed dying after he sends his friend Wyatt Earp away are, "Well, I'll be damned. Oh, this is funny." He then dies, and his story ends. This line seems puzzling, but it is perfectly explained by how Doc lived his life and how he views life and death. A good example comes from his line when killing Johnny Ringo, where Doc says Johnny is no "daisy at all" and is "just too high-strung."

Of course, he also tells Ringo that he looks like someone walked over his grave before their gunfight. This is how Doc Holliday lives his life, and he looks at his final moments and realizes it isn't anything he expected. Doc is lying in a bed, in a sanatorium, dying of an incurable disease. He is supposed to die in a blaze of glory, a gunfight to end all gunfights.

This is not what happened, and it is perfect that Doc sees it as the joke that it is. Doc does not get the death he might have deserved, and instead, he receives a quiet death after saying goodbye to his dearest friend. When Doc says, "This is funny," it is because he sees his death as the punch line of a joke, where he dies due to disease and not to a superior gunfighter. As he looks at his bare feet, he realizes the last joke as he dies without his boots on.

Doc Holliday's Dying Words Are A Perfect Twist On The Classic Western Story

In Western movies, it is almost always the case that heroes and villains die in a gunfight, almost always in the streets. This is the life that the heroes and villains of the Old West live for, the moments when they prove they are the quickest gun in the West, and they live and die by that conceit. The best Western movies almost always have these major gunfights at the end, and Tombstone is no different.

Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp both get their moments to prove they are the best with a gun, and they both kill the bad guys in the end. However, Tombstone turns this on its head and has Doc live and then die peacefully in bed after saying goodbye to Wyatt. It is something that subverts what anyone expects from a Western, but the fact that he gets his hero moment before this makes it even more bittersweet, a reason Tombstone stands out as a genre favorite.

Release Date December 25, 1993

Runtime 130 minutes

Director George P. Cosmatos

Writers Kevin Jarre

Producers Bob Misiorowski, James Jacks, Sean Daniel