by Jeremy Herb
Obituary writers have had their hands full this summer. Last Wednesday, there was 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, who followed columnist Robert Novak the previous day, who, since June 1, were pre-deceased by 16 celebrities. By our count, 18 notable personalities have died from June through August (and that's a low estimate, since there are several others who some consider celebs). The previous high? 2003, according to our celebrity estimate, when there were 16 celebrity deaths in the summer months. And we've still got a week left in August!
So what’s caused the sudden outburst of obituaries, spanning Michael Jackson to guitar inventor Les Paul to newsman Walter Cronkite? The answer isn’t found in how many celebrities have died, but how many are still alive today. Celebrities have been around for as long as humans have existed (wouldn’t “Lucy” be considered the oldest celebrity?), but with the creation of each new media—print, radio, TV, cable, the Internet—the number of celebrities has increased. We are coming into a period where a backlog of network TV stars, like Cronkite and McMahon, are hitting old age, and cable creations like Billy Mays are reaching millions of viewers.
Which means that this deadly summer is unlikely to be the last. “Think of all the famous cable stars that didn’t exist before: Bill O’Reilly, Larry King, the guys from Mad Men. That’s a pretty big crowd of people,” says Robert Thompson, a popular culture professor at Syracuse University. Cable and the Internet haven’t just created new stars like the Obama Girl, they’ve also upped the amount of coverage. “There’s an insatiable appetite for news of any kind about celebrities, whether it’s bellies hanging out or a nipple slip or whatever has happened,” says Peter Rollins, a retired professor at Oklahoma State University and former president of the National Popular Culture Association.
This week, we’re still fixated on coverage over MJ’s drug dosages, and bidding for the tomb above Marilyn Monroe has surpassed $4.5 million. Plus with sites like Facebook and Twitter, we can grieve in public ways that did not exist 10 years ago. In a post titled, “The Daily Death,” the blog Tomorrow Museum predicted we’ll have so many celebrities in the future that a famous person will die every 15 minutes. But the number of celebrities is not exponential.
The annual celebrity death count is still likely to increase for a few decades because the Internet is so new. Eventually, however, we’ll hit a plateau. That’s because there’s a finite number of people who can be considered “celebrities” before the word loses its meaning. Think about it, will you really be mourning the death of the guy who created "My New Haircut" 40 years from now, especially after ten-dozen similar videos have gone up? As for the immediate future, if 2003 is any indication, September will be just as busy for obit writers: Johnny Cash, John Ritter and four other celebrities all died that month alone.
