For the majority, the death of Clive Dunn in December was marked with little other than a shrug of the shoulders or a trip to YouTube to catch the video for “Grandad” one final time. For a small group of devotees, however, it was a cause for celebration. They didn’t harbour any hatred towards the Dad’s Army pratfaller, they just had a lot riding on it. These people are the deadpoolers.
Deadpooling can best be described as fantasy football for those with an ICD-10 personality disorder. Pick a group of celebrities you think will die, whoever gets the most points wins. In his 19th century novel Bel Ami, Guy de Maupassant talks of members of Parisian high society placing wages on which member of L’Académie française will be next to croak. Gossip columnists at a 1930s New York newspaper were the first to formalise it as a game, making it at sweepstake of morbidity: everyone gets the names of a notable at random: when yours turns to a corpse, you win. Therefore we know for certain who the first two people to “score” on a deadpool were: American aviator Wiley Post and cowboy comedian Will Rogers, who died in the same air crash in 1937.
Relying on such fate isn’t good for the modern deadpooler, though: when so much is at stake, you can’t rely on a Cessna engine failing. Drugs and alcohol are frowned upon as well: ask most people unfamiliar with deadpooling to name someone who they think will die in the next 12 months, and they’ll always go with Keith Richards or Shane McGowan. These people have steadfastly refused to die for 40 years, it’s unlikely they’ll start now.
No, the bread and butter of the deadpooler is terminal illness. Many of them have Google News Alerts set up for certain terms: “pancreatic cancer”, “stage IV metastasized”, “hospice care”, “glioblastoma multiforme”. Someones a major celebrity will be kind enough to do their dying in the private eye. This year, the majority of top teams in the internet’s most prestigious deadpool, the DerbyDeadPool, were based around a carefully composed spine of Robin Gibb, Etta James and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Three of the sweetest soul voices ever, there.
Where deadpoolers earn their stripes is with the less famous individuals. In the world of deadpooling, they become stars. Take Gary Carter, a baseball player who won the 1986 World Series with the New York Mets. But he was never more discussed among non-Americans than he was at the start of this year, gaining fame on deadpool message boards due to the fact that his daughter was kind enough to keep an online diary detailing his battle with stage IV brain cancer. He died on February 16th, aged 57, allowing the more conscientious deadpoolers an early lead in their leagues.
I know this myself because I picked him myself. I deadpool. I have those Google News Alerts, I scour Twitter, I keep my eyes peeled on any media I encounter for a slightest mention of an illness. I have a notepad with a list of over 150 people whose illness has been made apparent to me this year because, hey, how else am I going to grab that title? So former Senegalese national team manager Bruno Metsu? Honky tonk legend Ray Price? “Canada’s Chekhov” Alice Munro? My success in 2013 depends on you.
Start Here:
The internet’s most illustrious deadpool, mainly by dint of not being plagued by endless angry American teenagers. The rules are simple: pick 20 celebrities, the more that die the more points you get. The younger they die, the more points you get. It was originally believed that the 1,000th celebrity picked on the site to die was, impressively, Osama bin Laden. However, this was an admin error, he was the 1,001st. The 1,000th was, less impressively, snooker commentator “Whispering” Ted Lowe.
Originally founded as a student newsletter in 1986 in the aftermath of Cary Grant’s death to discuss who the next celebrity to die would be (it was Andrés Segovia), DeathList now functions as the #1 message board for the discussion of dying celebrities and deadpool tactics. For a long time it was the number one Google search result for “Clive Dunn”, leaving users worried as to who will replace Lance-Corporal Jones in the site’s affections.
Deadpooling American-style, and home of “The Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool”, named after the blues guitarist and race-baiting former chairman of the Republic Party who died of an astrocytoma in the early 1990s. Stands as the longest-running online deadpool and styles itself as “the home of death on the web since 1994”.
Words: Dom Passantino
