Is the 2016 curse a thing?
Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey – celebrities are dropping like flies in 2016, or so it seems.
Could it really be the case that the first few months of 2016 have been above average for famous deaths? This is not an easy question to answer quantitatively. For one thing ‘‘celebrity’’ or ‘‘famous person’’ is a subjective term. One person’s celebrity is another person’s nobody. Even once you’ve solved the problem of defining exactly who is and who isn’t a celebrity, who records when they die? A google search does reveal that a couple of websites are having a crack at building a definitive celebrity death database.
A quick browse of the results reveals famousdead.com to be the most comprehensive of these.
As you might expect however, the database is USA and pop
For one thing ‘‘celebrity’’ or ‘‘famous person’’ is a subjective term
culture-centric – Jonah Lomu doesn’t register a mention.
Nonetheless we created our own dataset out of the deaths listed on the site and attempted to look at the rate over celebrity death so far in 2016, compared to previous years. Here’s what we found: 45 ‘‘famous’’ people have died in 2016 according to famousdead.com.
That’s a rate of about one every 2.5 days. At the same time in 2015 the same website had registered 31 ‘‘famous’’ dead people.
Among their number was Leonard Nimoy – best known for playing Mr Spock in Star Trek, author Terry Pratchett and Saudi Arabian king, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. In all the database recorded 123 famous deaths in 2015, 117 in 2014, 255 in 2013 and 210 in 2012.
If the current rate of one dead famous person every 2.5 days 2016 will clock in with 146 dead famous people. So if the famousdeadpeople database is to be relied upon, 2016 isn’t an especially dangerous time to be a celebrity. Why might it seem that way? Perhaps the deaths of more high profile celebrities stay in our consciousness for longer as do sudden and/or unexpected deaths. The deaths of Bowie and Prince fall into both those categories.