TRIBUTES are being paid to Scotland after the entire country laughed itself to death.

The alarm was first raised after thousands of phone calls and text messages went unanswered.

Small groups of volunteers from Berwick-Upon-Tweed and Carlisle ventured north to find houses full of dead people gathered around still blaring television sets.

As RAF helicopters flew over deserted city streets, it was clear that the whole country had suffered a catastrophic abdominal rupture.

Wayne Hayes, a special constable from Northumberland, said: “We went into one house in Dunbar and found three men sitting on the sofa with huge smiles on their faces, still holding cans of 70 shilling. They seemed to be at peace.”

He added: “In a house near Edinburgh we found a man face down on the living room floor with his trousers and pants round his knees. It seems he may have been showing his bare buttocks to the television when he keeled over.”

Roy Hobbs, a civil engineer from Northampton, said: “I got a call from my friend Ian in Stirling. He was already laughing when I answered the phone, but after a few moments of the most vigorous and uncontrollable hilarity, everything suddenly went very quiet.”

Moving tributes are already being placed along the Scotland-England border with many mourners opting to leave a simple bag of chips or a deep fried bunch of flowers.