On the Internet, celebrity death is a spectator sport
By JEFFREY P. McMANUS
Some guy once said that "there are some things so tragic, you cannot help but laugh at them." The guy who said that isn't laughing now, of course, because he's dead. We living people can laugh at death; even better, we can wager on it.
Dead Pools are the online Kentucky Derbys of Death. The specifics vary from one pool to the next, but they're all pretty much based on the same principle: pick a celebrity who you think is not long for this world, then wait until you're proven correct. When the celeb kicks the bucket, congratulations! You're a winner! (It is presumed that greasing the celebrity yourself is cheating.)
Some pools are annual, with elaborate scoring systems based on how many dead celebrities pile up in each team's virtual morgue at the end of a year. Other pools are perpetual, permitting players to draft replacements after one of its celebrities is placed on the permanent disabled list, as it were.
Zachariah Love runs an annual pool known as the Lee Atwater Invitational, named after the bad-brains Republican politico who was the first "confirmed kill" scored by the originators of the contest way back in 1991.
Love says that the idea of a dead pool "appealed immediately to my natural cynicism and my general disdain for celebrities. So many of the people we deify are really just regular creeps with a lot of gall." The Atwater Invitational currently has 47 contestants, each of whom pay $10 annually for the privilege of playing.
Christian Ruzich runs a dead pool on the conferencing system The Well. He notes that some of his pool's more unlikely picks -- Julia Roberts, Bill Keane, James Earl Jones, Whitney Houston -- are "all healthy people with no known drug habits." Maybe they just appeal to a certain wishful thinking.
Elizabeth Fox, who runs the 32-member Dead Club, also observes that many candidates for imminent extinction seem picked for reasons other than their actual potential to join the ranks of the heavenly choir. Members of Fox's Dead Club have picked such presumably hale and hearty specimens as Richard Chamberlain, Drew Barrymore, Erik Estrada, Don Ho, and the Pam Anderson-Tommy Lee fetus.
Choosing a fetus in a dead pool? Now that's genius.
Fox's pool has a Junior Guppy Division, as well. "There are plenty of venomous choices, like Cody Gifford," she says.
If only.
The Lee Atwater Invitational permits players to submit its own separate "hate lists," says Love. "Some of the favorites for '96 who seem to stand little chance of actually dying are people like O.J. Simpson -- a favorite for women -- Anna Nicole Smith, and Courtney Love," whom he describes as "Generation X's Yoko."
Dead pools that permit players to choose the same celebrities provide us with a giddily creepy death-watch barometer. Jimmy Stewart was picked 17 times by Fox's Dead Club players, while Richard Pryor, O.J. Simpson and Ronald Reagan were chosen by 16 people each. Boris Yeltsin and Mother Teresa -- this summer's close-call candidates -- don't even rank in the top 10, pushed into obscurity by the bad-karma show horses of Simpson and Reagan.
And while we're on the subject of karma -- don't people think there might be something a little bit wrong with betting on who's going to die next?
Ruzich notes that the karma factor has affected his pool, but only slightly: "I had one person who said he was going to enter and then withdrew because he couldn't deal with the thought of rooting for someone to die. But I think for the most part, people don't pick people they care that much about one way or the other. If and when Meat Loaf dies, for example, I doubt the person that picked him is going to suffer pangs of guilt."
This leads to the dilemma of determining whether a particular celebrity has actually departed this mortal coil or not. (Quick: Charles Nelson Reilly, dead or alive? Pencils down! He's still alive.)
If you don't know if your chosen celebrity has actually died yet, there's the Dead People Server. This phenomenally useful site lists pretty much every celeb you'd ever care to know about -- and tons you couldn't care less about. F'rinstance:
Buddy Hackett (comedian/actor) -- Alive. Danny Kaye (actor) -- Dead. Leukemia. Mar 3, 1987. Charles Nelson Reilly (comedian) -- Alive. Telly Savalas (actor) -- Dead. Prostate cancer. Jan 22, 1994. Alex Trebek (game show host) -- Alive. Evelyn Wood (speed reading guru) -- Dead. Natural causes. Aug 26, 1995.
They even have a special subheading for "various Kennedys" -- one-stop shopping when you really need to figure out who's checked out of Camelot.
Mortality handicappers would also do well to stop by Ed's Ill Celebrity Server, which contains synopses of celebrities on the brink of death. While not as thorough as the Dead People Server, it includes articles on a number of likely candidates, from the cancerous Paul Tsongas to Mohammed's clay pigeon Salman Rushdie to the handgun poster boy James Brady.
In a world where the only certainties are death, taxes, and Microsoft, the appeal of playing with the Grim Reaper is inevitable. But instead of a chess match on the beach, it's turned out that it's a horse race on the Internet.
Other notable dead pools on the Web:
David Sugarman's Dead Pool
Phil Montgomery's Dead Pool
The Aces & Eights Society
Celebrity Death Pool
Jeffrey P. McManus is a writer and consultant who lives in San Francisco. A co-host of the Pop Culture conference on The Well, he has also worked as a news reporter for the Camarillo Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. His last piece for Salon was on his News Babe page.
Bookmark: http://www.salon1999.com/media/mediacircus.html