News reporter Christina Chubbock announced her on-air suicide with In keeping with the WXLT practice of presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local blood and guts news, TV 40 presents what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide.
The politician Buddy Dwyer said, Good bye to you all on the count of 3. Please make sure that the sacrifice of my life is not in vain.
A reporter at the news conference later described the event as just kind of a long-winded, sad event.
I always thought that that Filter song Hey Man Nice Shot was about basketball, but nope, it turns out it was about a corrupt politician named Buddy who was nobody’s buddy at the end.
Comedian and Magician Tommy Cooper didn’t shoot himself. He had a heart attack and millions of viewers laughed like it was part of the show, which by the way went on. The show must go on, they say. And it did.
Comedian Dick Shawn had a heart attack too, but the audience did not laugh at him. They laughed at other audience members who hollered out Take his wallet and How long is this going to go on?
Same thing for Redd Foxx. He was always faking heart attacks on Sanford and Sons–what his co-stars said for why they laughed and kept rolling with the scene.
Country singer David Olney was in the middle of his third song when he said sorry and put his head down.
Folk singer Colonel Bruce Hampton did him one better. As a young performer, he was asked what he dreamed of as a singer/songwriter and he didn't hesitate: to die on stage. Forty-some years later, he died singing the last song of his encore set at a concert with all his closest musician friends celebrating his 70th birthday. Which is what they call in the music industry: calling your shot.
Less of a fun anecdote is Owen Hart who dropped 78 feet from the rafters of the arena–back in the day when the big thing was professional wrestlers were entering the ring from the rafters the way Sting used to do it when he dressed up like the Crow and it was always really cool creepy, which made it a real bummer after Hart had to go and ruin it for everyone–and not even Brett.
Which then, Speaking of The Crow. Brandon Lee son of Bruce Lee. It was supposed to be a blank. Wikipedia says that the movie doesn’t actually have footage of him being accidentally murdered, but then that’s what the movie people would want you to believe.
Dimebag Darrell was shot by a fan in the middle of his first song. The guy was pissed that Pantera had broken up.
Let’s not even get started on the cinematographer Alec Baldwin shot, whose fault it was that they didn’t check the gun, the bullets, Alec Baldwin’s aim. Let the courts figure it all out. There’s so many other reasons to hate Alec Baldwin and every other Baldwin. And none of them going to bring back a cinematographer named Halyna Hutchins. Who will ever even remember her name a year from now? Innocent or guilty, the only name remembered being Baldwin, Baldwin, Baldwin.
There was the Crocodile Hunter, of course, which everybody knows the story of Steve Irwin getting stung by that 220 lb stingraypiercing him in the heart with quote-unquote hundreds of strikes in a few seconds. That, according to Wikipedia, was the only Stingray death recorded on film in history.
But did you know that my friend Gary the short story writer said Irwin had it coming to him? That he didn’t feel the least bit of sympathy for the Crocodile Hunter. That’s what you get for taunting those poor fucking sea creatures all the time. And that Irwin himself had told people that if he died, he wanted to be filmed being eaten by a croc. ABR–always be recording, he had drilled into his crew, which is what his cameraman did after he watched Irwin get stung by that 220lb stingray he kept filming, which is what my now-former friend Gary said was exactly the point. Exactly. Which was what point? I asked. Always be fucking recording, he said. Always be good TV.
That Irwin’s widow now owns the only copy of the film still in existence, if she feels guilty about not granting her dead husband’s wishes for a public death by deadly animal, well that’s ironic, sad, or devastating depending on your or my friend Gary’s point of view.
Of course there are so many stars struck down in their last minutes of fame, big stars and little stars, happy, sad, and angry, but I’m gonna go ahead and speak for myself when I say all of them–every single salacious clickbait title on Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit, and elsewhere they only remind me of all the sad miserable bastards who killed themselves alone in their basements or closets or the top rails of tall bridges in the middle of the night only to drown slowly and get washed away by the waves and never to get their own last words on tape.
Maybe you’re thinking that this is all leading to my friend Gary the short story writer alone in a closet with his dead father’s shotgun, which might be true, could very well be true, for all I know, not having spoken to him in years, having yet to come across his video online, a satisfying or unsatisfying conclusion to his life story depending on which one of us you ask–me, him, or you, the world at large.
And for me anyway, I’m always stuck with that good old philosophical question: if some poor miserable average unmemorable eighteen-year-old punk kid who nobody really liked that much in the first place blows his brains out all over his Megadeth poster on the bedroom wall above his headboard–no camera, no audience, nothing special about it, nothing to search for on YouTube or Reddit or Wikipedia–does anybody see it?
Does a falling tree make a sound if no one’s there to hear it?
No, no it does not.
Ask me how I know
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