Some years ago, I was introduced to a so-called humorous website called Death List because that’s what it is. An anonymous Death List committee chooses a list of 50 ‘celebrities’ who may die during the year. Last year, 14 of the 50 selected did indeed die, a “respectable” total, according to the website, adding that Deathlist 2023 “might be able to produce a solid performance.” Peer pressure, I suppose, was my excuse for laughing at this Death List malarkey, as I heard about people choosing three people in a ghoulish sweepstake, the one predicting the most deaths being the winner. Everyone, as I recall, chose the Queen Mother, which must have seemed a safe bet since she appeared to have been in her nineties forever, but what, I thought much further down the road, if the bet was about my own mother or father? How would I have felt about that?
I don’t encourage anyone to search the website, which is why I haven’t linked to it in this blog, but the main consideration is always age. How could it not be given that if something doesn’t get us before, old age is waiting? Next, I’d imagine there would be various factors to be taken into consideration, such as smoking, family history of certain conditions, wealth or the lack of it. The committee must have spent many hours going through the possibilities. I can think of better ways of spending my time.
My own mum would have been on the Death List for at least a decade as a lifetime of heavy smoking took its toll. Her decline was not enjoyable to behold, as long and painful deaths tend not to be. “Now look at this woman, the former Neeltje Verburg of Rotterdam. She has a family history of heart disease and both her father and brother died of smoking induced lung cancer. She’s in terrible pain. I’ll put her down for next year’s Death List. Won’t it be fun to cash in?” Am I exaggerating? Not at all. That will have been the conversation around the Queen Mother, and quite possibly Queen Elizabeth II a year ago. It’s not quite so funny now, is it?
I was also one for sick jokes, most so sick I wouldn’t dream of repeating them in public. Some ‘jokes’ would have made Frankie Boyle and Jerry Sadowitz blush. That bad. It was something a lot of us did, often to excess, not all that long ago. I don’t see them so much nowadays. That, I wonder, could be that a kind of evolution in humour and how we make fun of things has changed. That’s not to say everyone has been cancelled, because that definitely isn’t the case, but that people’s boundaries as to what they see as acceptable have changed. To an extent, that has happened to me.
I am definitely not perfect and my filters are far from perfect, either. And when I refer to the boundaries of humour, I strongly believe that the freedom to push those boundaries to the limit, or sometimes even beyond the limit. Sometimes, we can go too far, often in the heat of the moment, but preserving free speech and free expression matters too. Increasingly, it’s a fine line, managed not by some supervisory body but by us, the people. Also, we can choose just how much we want to be offended.
I now choose to ignore the Death List but I don’t fear offending people over a variety of subjects including politics and religion. Well, I don’t want to set out to offend someone but if it happens, it happens.
In general, I’m trying to be a better person in 2023 to the one I was in 2022. That’s not easy when you consider the raw materials I have to deal with, which make this world, for me, so black and white with no shades of grey. The latter will never change and in trying to become a better person, the division of black and white is even more pronounced. So be it. Wrong ‘uns are wrong ‘uns, full stop. I’m afraid I’ve gone too far to start making allowances or excuses for very bad people. I’ll stay away from them, just like I do now.
