It stars Elizabeth Peña as Vivian Saunders, a woman who comes home from work and finds her boyfriend Reggie Barker (Andrew McCarthy) pinned to her kitchen table with a long knife.

Vivian Saunders (Elizabeth Peña) comes home one day to an unusual surprise: her boyfriend Reggie Barker (Andrew McCarthy) is lying on the kitchen table with a large sword sticking out of his body.

At first Vivian thinks this must be some sort of joke, but she discovers that Reggie is indeed dead, and as she calls her best friend Louise (Paige Turco) to figure out what might have happened and what to do, it occurs to her that she blacked out after too much wine the night before and isn't sure what she did before she passed out.

David Nusair of DVD Talk negatively reviewed the film, saying "By the time we find out what really happened to McCarthy's character, it's impossible to care.

"[2] The New York Times stated that Dead Funny "tries so hard to be ingeniously tricky and ambiguous that it ends up outsmarting itself".