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After the last couple of days I was really worried for the well-being of Debbie Reynolds mum. But there was nothing on the news about her, so I assume she got through the day in one piece. The curse is broken. Good news for Debbie Reynolds’ mum’s mum tomorrow too.
In fact no proper universally loved celebrity died today at all, unless you count various footballers and a Swiss cartoonist (and I DON’T - their lives meant NOTHING!), so my 12 days of Deathmas song is fucked. Celebrities have no thought for anyone but themselves. Take one for the team, guys.
I made the Debbie Reynolds joke on Twitter, harmless as it is, just mocking the idea of spotting stupid patterns and the way everyone seems to take every death now with po-faced solemnity (remember how much fun it used to be on Twitter when someone died - back when Michael Jackson died we got through the sadness by taking the piss out of the circus that surrounded the tragedy and hardly anybody minded). I did think twice about posting it, as I do with nearly every Twitter joke nowadays. Whilst my followers would surely understand the joke, it now doesn’t take long for a RT or someone ghoulishly searching tweets about the dead in order to spot something to get affronted by (and I mean who is the real sick man?) and then offended tweets drip in and ruin everything. Indeed about four people decided to take me to task for daring to joke about someone who had just died (even though the joke wasn’t really about them) and I decided it wasn’t worth even that small amount of hassle and deleted it.
But I regretted the delete. Like any normal person I feel sad when someone dies, especially if they touched upon my life in some way and I appreciate that a mother seemingly dying of heartbreak over the death of her daughter is a tragedy. I don’t, in normal circumstances, feel the need to voice that though, because it’s such a regular, empathetic and human reaction that it would be odd to have to point it out. But there’s no proscribed way to respond to death, or how you’re meant to mourn and as I’ve said before I personally find people tweeting with artificial solemnity just as offensive, but I don’t bother tweeting them to let them know. Because you’re allowed to be overblown and self-indulgent and make everything about you if you want. 2016 has shown this phenomenon up more than ever, as we’ve had daily or twice daily celebrity deaths and you watch the same people eulogising each new cadaver as the greatest or most important figure in their life, only to find there’s another one who was equally or more important half an hour later. And look, that’s OK, if you find the best way to cope with sadness is to share your thoughts with others, that is OK. I find the best way to cope with sadness or the fear of my own mortality (which is as much a part of this as anything for many I think) is to make jokes, be mildly inappropriate and try and laugh in the face of death, even though I know death will be getting the last laugh (well maybe Satan in my case).
Let’s leave each other alone to grieve/get through it in our own way. I hope that when I die there will be laughter and jokes and jokes at my expense. Because I’ll be gone and won’t care anyway and I presume the people to whom I matter will be upset enough without having to worry about what (if Twitter is anything to go by when I discussed this) a load of terrible fish puns. I would prefer inappropriateness, given that my life’s mission has been to destroy the pun as a comedic art form (there are a few exceptions and some people who can pull them off -phnarr- but most of you are rubbish at them), because of the giddy excitement that testing boundaries can produce. I liked it when social media gave us the freedom to do what we wanted, before it got over taken by 21st Century Mary Whitehouses and 21st Century Fascists.
Ah well, I will keep making the inappropriate jokes in the Twitter that is my own brain. You can imprison my actual Twitter but not the Twitter in my mind. And to be honest, the stuff that goes on in there could do with someone taking me to task and censoring me. It’s awful.
