Unproduced Sketch: Funeral for a Celebrity You Thought Was Already Dead

This one is perhaps a little callous, but I think it comes from a very real place. There was a point a few years ago when I learned a famous author had died. It was, of course, sad, but I was also legitimately shocked to learn he had not died years before. That produces a very weird stew of conflicting emotions. And any time I notice a contradiction it feels like a good opportunity for comedy.

This starts as a reflection on the weirdness of mourning a death you thought had already happened, but moves on into the strange ways people acknowledge death online. It’s flippant. A tweet about the death, and then back to bullshit minutes later. Or it’s some strange ghoulish grasping — people trying to tie themselves to the celebrity, to make it relevant to their lives. It’s a relationship with death that is wholly at odds with the way people react to a personal death.

We didn’t make this because we couldn’t find a church-like space we could afford to shoot in. That may not seem like a huge deal, but the core engine of this sketch is in the flippant ways people treat celebrity death juxtaposed with the pomp and solemnity that accompanies a typical funeral. If we didn’t have the grandeur of the space, we would lose a lot of that juxtaposition.

I have no idea if the final list of names in this sketch is still accurate, and frankly I’m too nervous to check.