Because while everyone is talking about the sheer volume and shock value, obviously John Glenn’s isn’t equivalent to George Michael’s, for example. I want to get a better sense of how “bad” it really has been this year, and how much is just exaggeration.
Prince was a big, big surprise.
Carrie Fisher today was a surprise in many ways(well, a few days coming, but still).
George Michael was a big surprise.
Anton Yelchin? Out of nowhere.
Alan Rickman? Yeesh, he kept his illness private so it was a big shock.
David Bowie? I had no idea, but perhaps others knew.
Kevin Meaney was a big surprise to me as well.
Jose Fernandez was another freak thing that blew me away.
Alan Thicke was also a surprise, such a fit guy at 69.
I’d say many deaths were hugely surprising this year, but the quantity of deaths was really weird.
This article is from a British newspaper/tabloid, but the theories it has on why this year seems worse than other make sense. It includes that Baby Boomers are getting to the ages where they are more likely to develop cancer and heart disease and other life threatening conditions, celebrities are more likely to have led wild lifestyles that certainly don’t help their health at the very least, and the deaths are felt more keenly since everyone knows immediately and can share their stories about it online. For example, Alan Rickman was a fantastic actor, but he wasn’t big in the tabloids or otherwise a big ‘celebrity’ so it’s possible if it wasn’t for Facebook and Twitter and other online resources, a lot of people wouldn’t have noticed his death until they realized it’d been a while since they’ve seen him in movies.
This year could be a statistical anomaly, or could just be the new normal in regards to celebrity deaths.
My completely scientific study by comparing Wikipedia’s 2015 deaths to 2016 deaths.
Number of deaths listed:
2015: 309
2016: 344
Average age:
2015: 79
2016: 79
Number of deaths under 70:
2015: 67 - 21.6%
2016: 73 - 21.2%
Enalzi mostly confirmed what I think about right around November each year. Every year everyone says that it’s the worst year ever/a horrible year for celebrity deaths. I’m sure some years are worse than others, either personally or statistically, but I’m willing to bet most years are mostly average, it’s just hard to tell while you’re still right there in the moment.
Yeah, Prince and Bowie were huge shocks, but we have those every year. Whitney Houston, Patrick Swayze, Robin Williams, Paul Walker, Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Even people you know were heading right for the Forever 27 club, you have to admit, still caught you off guard (Amy Winehouse).
It’s like how in about 2 months everyone is going to talk about how it’s still snowing and it’s March like it’s the first time that’s ever happened when in reality it happens nearly every year.
Are there just more celebrities now? There are more movies released than there used to be, more TV shows on more channels, more public figures who become famous, and it seems like more turnover in popular music. With more famous people, more of them are going to die in any given year.
The BBC also had an article on whether 2016 is an outlier in terms of deaths.
Their conclusion: the first quarter of 2016 was significantly higher than usual, but the total for the year wasn’t particularly unusual.
In 2017, all the celebrities you grew up with will be a year older and therefore a year closer to death.
QUANTITY of deaths might be the same but it feels like the uncountable factor is… for lack of a better word… quality. There were many in the super beloved, idol-status category this year. Every year has a few, but it FEELS like it was a constant barrage of music favorites and tv parents. That ephemeral FEELING is what makes this year seem more sad, whereas just as many died last year and will next year.
I wonder if part of it that as each year passes, instead of it being ‘old’ people dying or people that your parents listened to or watched on tv, now it’s your/our celebrities.
Or to look at it differently, about 10 years ago a few of my parent friends died close (WRT time) together. My mom said ‘this isn’t supposed to be happening to us, this is supposed to happen to our parents’, my brother replied ‘it is happening to our parents’. Time marches on, and all that (ch ch ch changes).
Not especially surprising. There will be as many or more in 2017 and many years to come.
This is the answer. 2016 was front-loaded with an unusual number of high profile unexpected deaths – David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey, Paul Kantner, Maurice White, Keith Emerson, Garry Shandling and Prince – sprinkled with a good number of really old people whose deaths weren’t surprising but happened to all go within a few weeks of each other (Abe Vigoda, Anton Scalia, Nancy Reagan, Harper Lee, etc.)
Most of the year was pretty ordinary in terms of celebrity deaths. Of course, the year had to add irony to injury by kicking out a few surprises right at the end…
Wilder, Ali, Prince, Fisher, Rickman, Shandling, Bowie, and (Sir) Wogan are so famous they are known by just one name - not like Madonna who goes just by the one name - and all had multi-decades of success and fame. I think it’s more than just the numbers of celebrities who’ve passed.
Ali, Prince, Wogan, Bowie, Rickman, Shandling, Fisher, Gabor, Cohen, and Wilder all had multi-decades of success and were so well-known you recognise every one by just their surnames. I can’t think of any of them being in any huge controversy either (except Prince’s album, Ali’s not wanting to fight in Vietnam, Gabor’s marriages and Fisher’s personal battles).
Well Zsa Zsa Gabor’s death wasn’t a surprise at all; the surprise was that she was still alive right up until last week.
I think I said this in another thread, but you can’t live decades of your life doing hard drugs and expect to live a long life.
We’re getting to the time now that the hard-partying late-70s, 80s and 90s stars are reaching the point where their bodies just can’t take it anymore.
I’m sure it’s true for Great Britain, but Wogan is not well known in the US. I had to Google him.
I think one of the things that makes 2016 stand out is the way people have also been dropping in niche fields, not just the big names everyone knows. For example, I follow horse racing, and the recent death of Garrett Gomez was just as shocking to racing fans as, say, Carrie Fisher to the world at large. (He was retired and only 44.) I’d guess that a lot of lesser known deaths fall into this category, and it just feels like they are piling up.
In America, Prince goes by just one name. Muhammad Ali was Ali’s default name. After you said that you might just refer to Ali, but that’s true of every celebrity. If you said Wilder or Rickman died, most people would go “Who?” until you added Gene and Alan. Same for Fisher and Shandling. Wogan wouldn’t be recognized at all even if you said Terry Wogan or Sir Terry Wogan or gave his full Wikipedia biography.* Bowie did use David on his records so that’s the only one on that list I can give you.
*I’m talking public, 99% name recognition, fame. Somebody here must know who he was but he wouldn’t make even the most complete list of one name famous people in *People *[the magazine].
Some deaths are not surprising (Zsa Zsa, Castro, Abe Vigoda), but some are a shock (Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Prince)
Brian
I would say that two events (both plane crashes) might have pushed the number of “prominent deaths” (for a given value of “prominent”) way upwards: the accidents that basically wiped out the whole Chapecoense soccer team on its way to its first final of the Copa Sudamericana (nov. 28th) and the Russian Army Choir on its way to a concert for Russian military personnel in Syria (Christmas day).