The Funniest Times News of a Celebrity’s Death Was Greatly Exaggerated
Listen, the news business is tough. Yes, fact-checking is important, but when there’s a breaking story, there’s not always time to get it straight before those bastards at Insert Competing Publisher get the scoop. Sometimes, though, it pays to be cautious, at least if you don’t want some very powerful enemies because you forced them to read about their own deaths.
Mark Twain
Of course, preeminent American humorist Mark Twain most famously announced that “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” but he actually had to do it twice. The first time, his cousin’s illness resulted in a game of telephone that led to his notorious quip, but 10 years later, after The New York Times reported that his boat was lost at sea, he wrote an article for the same newspaper investigating his own possible death. At least, after both mistakes, we got some great writing out of it.
Gabriel García Márquez
Unfortunately, we got some rather bad writing out of a Peruvian newspaper’s announcement of the death of author Gabriel García Márquez in 2000 after he’d actually only been diagnosed with cancer. Some kind of mix-up resulted in a “farewell poem” supposedly written by Márquez being published alongside the announcement, which seemed to upset Márquez more than the announcement itself. “What could kill me is someone thinking I wrote such a corny thing,” he said. It ended up being pneumonia, but he had a point.
Alice Cooper
Unlike most such mistakes, Melody Maker knew exactly what they were doing when they published a satirical obituary of Alice Cooper in 1973. They were talking about the death of his career, but so many fans reached out to them in confused anguish that they had to publish a retraction, quoting the man himself as saying, “I lost $4,000 ... at blackjack last night. I could have died!” and “Am I alive? Well, I’m alive and drunk as usual.”
Ernest Hemingway
To be fair, it wasn’t that big of a leap to assume that Hemingway had died in a plane crash in Africa in 1954. He was hurt very badly, and he’d actually been involved in two plane crashes, and it’s not like the mid-1950s were a great time for surviving such incidents. But survive, he did, and he was so amused by his own obituaries that he collected them in a scrapbook to read every morning over a glass of champagne. We like Twitter and cold brew, but you do you, Ernie.
Like, All of CNN’s Pre-Written Obituaries
As morbid as it might seem, a lot of famous people’s obituaries are written ahead of time. People are on deadlines, and you know, sometimes the writing’s on the wall, so it might as well be in the CMS. That practice came back to bite CNN in 2003, however, when trolls found out they could access the news organization’s stockpile of unpublished obituaries, which didn’t remain unpublished for long. The best part is that they appeared to be placeholders full of wildly inaccurate filler, mostly based on the obituary of the Queen Mother, who had died the previous year. For example, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was described as “the U.K.’s favorite grandmother.” Cheney has been called a lot of things, but definitely never that.
