The Curious Consolation of Online Mourning
In a blog post that presumably ran yesterday I wrote about how Twitter is not completely worthless. It's a toxic sewer for the most part but there are upsides to it.
When Joe Flaherty and Richard Lewis died, for example, I was touched by the outpouring of love and appreciation that ensued.
Flaherty and Lewis were not super famous. Flaherty might be the least famous of the original SCTV castmembers but he had the distinction of being a core part of two of the greatest shows of all time in SCTV and Freaks and Geeks.
He was a quintessential cult figure. The essence of that kind of fame is that it is not widespread but it is intense. While I was saddened by Flaherty’s death I took some comfort in knowing just how much he meant to people.
Flaherty left an indelible footprint on comedy and pop culture. He was particularly beloved among comedy buffs and professional funnypeople. He was not the first SCTV alum to die. That unfortunate distinction belonged to the most popular and beloved cast-member, John Candy. He’s been dead for thirty years and I still miss him terribly. But Flaherty was the first major alum to die
I will never know why gifts to humanity like Candy die young while Donald Trump will live to be a hundred despite subsisting solely on fast food, Diet Coke and bottomless, incoherent rage.
It’s easy to be cynical about public displays of grief on social media. There can be a performative aspect to it. Celebrities do tend to pick up a lot of fans upon dying but the grief over Flaherty’s death feels sincere and genuine.
The same is true of Richard Lewis. I’ve been a fan of Lewis since I was a kid and would watch him in Anything But Love, a sitcom that paired him with Jamie Lee Curtis and gave me delusional hope that a fellow neurotic depressive Jew could end up with a woman who looks like Jamie Lee Curtis.
But I also liked Lewis because he was so relatable. Lewis made depression a central part of his shtick and his material but he was also clearly a man who was in a lot of pain.
He was a man who had suffered but alchemized all of that pain and all of that despair into humor. That pain was physical as well as psychological. Before his fatal heart attack at 76 he had retired from stand-up because of his Parkinson’s Disease.
That mullet, though.
Flaherty and Lewis both touched a lot of lives, both in terms of the people that they knew and worked with or fans who revered their work.
When someone like Matthew Perry dies you expect a massive outpouring of grief. He was, after all, on one of the most popular television shows of all time. But it’s a pleasant surprise when someone like Flaherty or Lewis dies and you learn just how beloved they were and how much they meant to people.
This is partially because I myself am a cult figure. If this site were to cease to exist I know that thirty or forty people would be devastated. That means a lot to me. This website is not terribly popular or lucrative but it has attracted commenters and patrons who have made it a big part of their everyday online existences. If you read this site regularly you probably know who they are because they comment so frequently and insightfully.
That means the world to me. I’d love to be super popular like John Green, my casual friend turned make-pretend enemy, in part because of all the money involved but I take pride in knowing that while I do not have many readers or patrons or followers the ones that I do really care and that is incredibly validating.
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here
AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here