There’s been a pandemic for a year. So why does 2016 still hit different for celebrity deaths?
By: Chris Beer
Tags: Covid 19, Death, Dataviz, Celebrity, 2016

There’s been a pandemic for a year. So why does 2016 still hit different for celebrity deaths? Chris Beer Feb 12·8 min read

One of my biggest frustrations with lockdown has been my inability to share my mundane brainteasers with people. How many holes does a straw have? Are Thin Lizzy’s two best-known songs (“Jailbreak” and “The Boys Are Back In Town”) written about the same event*? What’s the difference between a drib and a drab?

One thing that has always bothered me was the number of celebrity deaths in 2016. Why so many? Was it more than average? Was it really a cursed year? And more recently: why did 2020, the year of a global pandemic, feel less fatal to celebrities than “twenty fucking sixteen”?

Many analyses were written at the time, with compelling evidence to suggest from the BBC to suggest it was more fatal to celebrities, but then a more muted response from some Medium contributors.

A common opinion that was voiced as 2016 wound down was that given the age profile of the Baby Boomer generation, it was perhaps natural we should expect more famous departures at this point in history. Through mass media, that generation created more famous people; when their time comes, they will create multiple long obituaries.

I’ve never been completely convinced by this, and I would suggest the years since 2016 have failed to affirm that theory. None of them attracted anywhere near the same, year-long feeling that the Grim Reaper was walking up and down the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a long checklist.

With the benefit of more time, and more data to look at, I wanted to settle this once and for all: why, 2016? Why?

A busy scythe

One thing I want to mention at the top is a reminder of how 2016 developed in such an…eerie way. David Bowie went in the first fortnight; Terry Wogan and Alan Rickman joined him before January was up. So there was an early sense that something, even if couldn’t be measured, was above-average. A year is, of course, a fairly arbitrary division of time. But it seemed testament to 2016’s spooky power that George Michael died on Christmas Day, and Death managed to squeeze in Carrie Fisher before the year was out as well, to be joined the day after by her goddamn mother.

Nevertheless. The first step in this investigation was figuring out what data source to use. I consulted a number of news websites and their obituary archives, “those we lost” recaps and so on, but none sufficed. All were too shaped by an editor’s hand to fit a pre-existing template. It was difficult to find a source that balanced British and American celebrities, to boot.

I have of course played my hand here; this is a project with a deep Western bias. But celebrity culture, such as it is, is implicitly Anglo-American anyway. I don’t think that’s a problem, provided we all recognise what we’re talking about. OK? OK.

Having abandoned The New York Times, BBC, Hollywood Reporter, and what I thought would be the best organs to track celebrity deaths, I had to go to the mothership: Wikipedia.

Thanks for everything, Jimmy W

Wikipedia has a page for pretty much each year in human history, with each year showing the famous people that died in said year. So I could think of no source that would be more authoritative, more thorough, or more objective. It’s not 100% of those things, by any means, but it’s the best there is.

You could argue that the deaths it tracks are outside what we might call “celebrities” as it includes political leaders, monarchs, and people from more walks of life. To which I would reply that “celebrity” is a fluid term anyway. Some people don’t care about sport, which probably provides the biggest celebrities of all. And I’d rather look to a source that encompassed too much than too little.

Having scraped data from Wikipedia before, I knew that its pages for years suffer from a recency bias. Quite simply, the pages for years that have just passed tend be longer, with more events and more deaths. Wikipedia is a source for current events as much as it is for history, so this bias is the product of those years being consulted more for contemporary commentary than as a matter of historical record.

So I knew straight away it was unlikely that the sheer number of famous deaths in a given year would provide the most accurate picture. My next thought was word count. Surely length of a page is equivalent to someone’s impact on the world?

Alas, this was too tricky for me to code. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a better yardstick. Its metadata for each page shows how many bytes in size the page is. You can scrape this number fairly easily, and takes into account more than just words — it includes pictures, links, and so forth.

(I’ve since seen other people had the same idea, but what led me to think of it was catching the list of the biggest articles on Wikipedia. The single biggest article that isn’t a list is the one for Donald Trump. While he casts a long shadow on our recent memories, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could rival him for public presence in, well, the history of time. In case you’re wonderng, Cristiano Ronaldo and Tom Brady are 2nd and 3rd place respectively.)

By taking an average of all these figures, you get a sense of how “thick” a year was for celebrity deaths; how well-known the people that died were. Mean, not median; if someone twice as famous as everyone else died that year, you don’t want to miss out. In this case, outliers are useful.

After a couple of hours scraping data, I was ready to plot the number of deaths in a year against the average size of articles for the people that died in it. Here’s what I ended up with:

Follow the x-axis to the right, and you can see the recency bias in effect. I was hoping, though, you’d see 2016 float to the top right; having not just a high number of deaths, but a bigger average life impact of those deaths. It’s kinda getting there, but you can see it trails behind some years that no-one mentions in the same breath as 2016.

(I labelled 1974 as it struck me just what a humdrum time for deaths it was. The obituary writers rested easy that year.)

So I plotted the data again, this time focusing just on the y-axis, on that average length of article. Here’s the top 10:

As you can see, 2016 sneaks in. But to me, it still didn’t feel right. I couldn’t quite believe that by this measure, it was only the 4th worst year for celebrity deaths in one decade.

Not all celebrities are made equal

So I decided to come at it with a different approach. What struck me as notable about class of ’16 is just how famous those people were. Bowie, Muhammad Ali, Prince — people who represented things much bigger than themselves.

So maybe what distinguished 2016 deaths wasn’t their quantity, or even the average impact of the person, but the number of “super-famous” people that died.

(An admin note on the data: this only looks at years after 1960. That’s partly to ensure the formatting is consistent on Wikipedia, but also because once you go back further you end up dealing with war criminals and the definition of “celebrity” becomes even more twisted than I’m currently making it.)

I thought for a while about how to define “super-celebrity”. At one point I was tempted to call it anything above over 100,000 bytes, as I like a round number as much as the next guy, and it seemed to work well.

But then I remembered: percentiles! Percentiles are a thing! If I take all the byte figures for all celebrity deaths since 1960, I can calculate “super-celebrity” more reliably. The top 1% of celebrity, on these parameters, is having a Wikipedia article bigger than 143,734.46000000002 bytes. That’s a life goal to aim for, isn’t it? Though of course, it only applies once you’re dead.

This is where things get really interesting. Now we can cut the data by the number of “super-celebrity” deaths that occurred in each year. Generate the top 10 for that, and you end up with this:

This is more like it! By this definition, 2016 is the second-worst year for super-celebrity deaths in recent history, and effectively since the dawn of celebrity culture.

But what’s this? The only year to rank above it is 2020, the year just passed, the year dominated by COVID-19. Perhaps — contrary to my initial expectations — COVID-19 really did take out as many celebrities as strange, supernatural forces conspired to do in 2016.

Only one thing left to do: track down the super-celebrities from these years to make sure the data is valid, and to figure out just who exactly they are:

1994 added for completion’s sake. You’ll see that sports stars are heavily featured. Some have argued sports stars are flattered by Wikipedia because articles about them tend to feature a lot of lists. There’s value in that, though I do think sportspeople are the most prominent class of celebrity there is.

Personally, when I look at the deaths for 2020, I still see recency bias in effect. I suspect Naya Rivera and Brodie Lee’s articles have been boosted post-mortem on one hand by the need to provide clarity about the circumstances of their deaths, and on another to burnish what they achieved in life, having seen them curtailed prematurely.

But, all things considered, 2020 will most likely join 2016 at the top of the leaderboard for celebrity deaths and the social media accolade of “worst year ever”. But you know the funny thing? None of those listed in 2020 actually died from COVID-19.