IT is known as a party town — and now even funerals are being turned into entertainment, as the residents of New Orleans put the fun back into funerals by thinking outside the box when it comes to their own wakes.

    Last week, friends and family of Miriam Burbank, who died at the age of 53, requested that she attend her own service — which she duly did, sporting sunglasses and propped up at a table with a can of beer in one hand and a menthol cigarette in the other.

    After word of the unusual arrangement spread, funeral director Louis Charbonnet, who posed Burbank in his parlour, was inundated with calls from local people requesting that they too be helped to attend their own funeral in lifelike poses reflecting their characters.

    Charbonnet said his 132-year-old establishment prided itself on putting the “fun” into funerals.

    “A couple of weeks ago we even had a mariachi band in here,” he told the New York Times.

    While other local funeral directors, and even his own wife, accuse him of impropriety by placing corpses in positions many might consider amusing, Charbonnet said a local priest had given him the all-clear, and that he considered it was respectful to abide by the requests of grieving family members who take solace from seeing their loved one in a familiar pose.

    Charbonnet is not the first to pose cadavers in such a way.

    Earlier this year, the family of Ohio biker Billy Standley honored his wish to be towed to a cemetery astride his customized Harley-Davidson.

    And in Chicago in 1984, a well-known gambler called Willie “Wimp” Stokes attended his funeral at the wheel of a coffin in the shape of a Cadillac Seville.  (SD-Agencies)