Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Obituaries

Episode Date: December 18, 2019

Learn everything we know about obituaries in 12 minutes! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, and welcome to short stuff. This is Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry. We're gonna talk about death.

It's a natural super hip thing to do. And there's Dave Ruse in a bottle with a cork on top screaming, let me out. Right? That was weird, but I loved it. Yeah, Dave helps us out with the longer form stuff, but this is one of the old, I don't know how old, but one of the old house stuff works shorties

that he put together. Yeah, I don't think it was old. I think it was new. Is it new? One of the new houses. I just mean the old website. Oh, gotcha. Like E old.

You gotta say it like that. With an E. Was it old with an E? Yeah, sure. E oldy. We sure wasted a lot of time. Good. So Chuck, we're talking obituaries.

Like I said. That's right, do you read these? Probably not, cause you're under 80. No, yeah, no, but people do love them. Yeah, it's interesting. I read that on, oh, I think beyond the dash is what it was called, which is great. Cause you know the dash between the date of birth

and the date of death, there's a dash between them. There's a website, an obituary website called beyond the dash. And they said, an obituary is like your final gift to a loved one. You're celebrating their life for all to see and read or if you're one of those weirdos who reads obituaries for those people to read and see.

Yeah. I think it's long been like elderly people read obituaries. The joke is sort of that, you know, because they're not in them. Man, when ageism becomes a real thing in like 10 years, this episode is not going to have aged well. It's already a thing. A real thing.

Oh, okay. You know what I mean? Yeah. But they have always, well, they've changed a lot over the years, which is sort of interesting in this, one of the, I mean, we're going to plug the genealogy website.

No. Okay. There's a genealogy website though that has, apparently you can learn a lot about your genealogy just from researching obituaries because they list so many people in the family. It's like a family tree there. Yeah.

So, and then even obituary websites and genealogy websites, they've unleashed AI on these things. And the bots have really had a field day coming up with obits dating back as far as I can see to the 1750s, at least in the United States. Yeah. This one genealogy website has 262 million published obituaries online.

Yeah. See if you can figure out which one it is. Yeah. I guess so. But so the bots have kind of, they've said, okay, well, from what we've been able to ascertain, at least from digitized newspaper records, going back to the mid 18th century,

obits weren't a very big thing. Unless you were famous. Yeah. That's a really good point. Yeah. The deaths of famous, well-known, successful people have always intrigued us. Yeah.

And I don't think you might have told me that obituaries were pre-written for a lot of people. Yeah. Like the New York Times obits, like the real deal ones. Yeah. I think you told me that a couple of years ago or something and I was just astonished. I definitely knew that.

Yeah. It sounds like something I would tell you. Probably. And it's not made up. Over our afternoon tea. Right. But they'll just have like an obit going on somebody and then when they finally die,

they can get it out the door really quick just by kind of summing up at the end. Just fill in that last be on the dash. Yep. And maybe if they did anything noteworthy and the last like eight months of their life. Right. So they didn't?

What I wonder is do they, is it just for old people or people that they think like are risky? Oh, I wonder. You know? We'll have to ask Jeremy Piven. I don't get that right. He played an obituary writer in one.

Really? Some movie. Yeah. Was he an obituary writer who was a big jerk? Probably. Because he got specializes in those roles. He does. He does.

Interesting. So mid 19th century, you started seeing this change from just famous types to regular old people getting their local paper usually to publish sort of stripped down obituaries. Yeah, it was called a death notice. Or it's basically. Like super stripped down.

Yeah, this person died and that's that. There's still death notices around today and apparently if you're into obituaries so much that you will publish a death notice. What you're saying is it's basically like a hold the date for more information about the funeral. Right. They still do those today.

But that was what obituaries were originally. It was just, you know, the person's name, they died, maybe who they were survived by maybe a little bit about the funeral. But the reason obits were so thin originally was because back in the day before the lino type was invented and I think the 1880s, when you put a newspaper together,

every page, every letter. Every letter. Of every word, of every sentence, of every line, of every page. Of every graph to use some lingo. Thank you. Was set by hand. Yeah.

By hand. Yeah. Every letter. So that's why certain obituaries just had a name and died. Right, exactly. With a date maybe. And you felt lucky to have even been mentioned.

Probably so. Yeah, but then lino type came along and they said, hey, we've got a lot. It's a lot easier to make a newspaper now. Let's make more newspaper every day. Yeah, so maybe we'll take a quick break. Oh boy. And we'll come back and talk a little bit more

about obituaries. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

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Just listen up to Josh and Chuck, stuff you should know. Hey, Chuck, let's talk a little bit more about obituaries. Yeah, I mean, certain things like the Civil War, obviously, would ramp up the death notices, like tens of thousands of these going out every year. Yeah, and this was even before the linotype, too. Right, I think because they were soldiers,

they felt like they needed to do so, even though it was a pain. Plus, also, there seems to have been a real increase in fascination with death among the Victorians. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I mean, that's when they were taking bereavement photography. Oh, that's true.

They were holding funerals at home, but they became much more elaborate over time. Yeah, well, what really changed was newspapers discovered that they could charge people money to get a loved one listed in an obituary column, and they could make some dough on it. And then it became a real thing. They made fat stacks, as everyone called it in 2011.

These stats are pretty amazing, though, from 1,900, what, 400,000 obituaries in 1900, and then that's from two million total newspapers. By the 1930s, there were 1.25 million obituaries in about two and a half million total pages. Yeah, so obituaries themselves in number exploded. Because they were making dough. Right, but they also, the amount of the newspaper

that they represented exploded to them from a fifth to a half of all pages were obituaries. Really? Yeah, that's, I mean, my math, it's usually wrong, but I'll bet it's close. 1.25 million obituaries in two and a half million pages. That's half, right down the middle. Right down the middle, yeah.

And this is where, in the 30s and 40s, is where you start to see that sort of classic obituary notice that we know today, not just died, sorry. But stuff, it's a four-part thing, the death announcement, a little bit of a bio, who they're survived by, and then a little bit of the funeral info. Right, and it didn't have to be like one paragraph each,

but I mean, like, it was in those segments. Sometimes the middle bio part was extensive, depending on what they'd done. You know, sometimes the survived bio was bigger than other times. Like that sweet story about that veteran who died in Florida, I think a couple months ago, and he outlived all of his family,

and somebody got word of it, and it became like a viral thing. And 10, I think like 10,000 people showed up for his funeral to make sure that he was seen off, that he wasn't forgotten. What is your obituary say? I assume you have pre-written it. First of all, it just says died.

Died. Yeah, I've pre-written it. I'm on draft like six or seven. Yeah, I got you. No, I have not. Have you done yours? No, of course not. I haven't even thought of mine.

I'm still L-I-V-I-N. All right, all right, all right. So this is where the genealogy comes in, in that now you've got spouse's name, children's names, married names of daughters, grandchildren. I mean, you might see cousins if it's noteworthy. Or even if it's not, if that's what the family wants in there.

Right, right, because so the obituary, as Ruse puts it, is a quasi-legal document. A lot of people think you have to by law publish this in the newspaper, you don't. You do by law have to file for a death certificate, like we talked about in the home burials short stuff. But you don't have to publish it in obituary. But it still definitely lets the community know,

hey, this person died, if this person happened to owe you money, here's your chance to come make your claim against the estate or whatever. So it does serve some sort of function, but it's not a law that you have to publish an obituary. But it is up to the funeral home typically to publish the obituary or contact the local newspaper. But the family gives all the info

that they want included in it. And they're the ones who are footing the bill. I think it's usually charged by line. So if you want to include Cousin, sure. But it's going to cost you an extra $0.80. Right. Second Cousin, Eddie, really worth it. And then things changed again really after 9-11, apparently

when the obituaries became much more personal. And these great stories started coming out about the people who died on 9-11. And I think that sort of, at least according to the people that they quote in this article, said that that kind of changed things all over the country. And people started being a lot more honest and maybe funny and making them real memorials.

But also, like I said, being honest and not brushing things under the rug. Like if someone suffered from depression and died by suicide, they wouldn't just put a vague sort of. Died suddenly at home. Yeah, exactly. That's what they used to say. Yeah.

And I'm sure some of them still do. But I think there's a trend toward honesty and openness now more so. For sure. And apparently, according to Susan Soper, who's an obituary expert, as far as Dave Ruse is concerned. Sure. She said that that was probably what turned the tide,

that September 11th narrative obituary thing. Did you read about that last thing, about saying that the deceased will not be missed in some cases? Whose was that? Was that just one? As far as I could tell, it was just one. But a few years back, there was a woman whose children, whose adult children said that the world would be better off

without her, or the world is now better off without her, and she will not be missed. She really jilted them as children, and they had never forgiven her for it. And it caused a huge outcry and backlash. Really? And actually, everyone sympathized with the dead woman. Not the kids.

And not the kids. The kids were taken as little monsters who couldn't forgive their mom. But it was a huge deal, and it really kind of said a lot about how we view the deceased and their last send-off. Right. Just how many warts should you show? Right.

And even if that was, I don't know, I'm not going to take a side. But even if that's the case, is it gratifying to give mom a finger on the way out the door? Yeah, I don't know. You'd have to ask those kids. Not a finger, the finger. They were probably very surprised at the international

backlash that it garnered. Interesting. Well, that's it for obituaries, Chuck. Yes. That means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

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