2023 was an even deadlier year for celebrities than 2016 – and this graph proves it

Let's do some data science with dead celebrities

Annoyingly I had to remove Captain Tom and Diana greeting them at the gates as I couldn’t find decent royalty-free photos of them. (Berlusconi from here, Kissinger from here.)

If you had to pin-point a year when it all started to go wrong, 2016 would probably be a good choice.

It wasn’t just the twin horrors of the Brexit Referendum and the election of Donald Trump – but it was the constant drumbeat of death. From David Bowie and Muhammad Ali to Fidel Castro and Antonin Scalia, it felt like all of our childhood heroes were dropping dead.

No wonder “Fuck you 2016!” became that year’s catchphrase.

However, fast-forward to today and I can exclusively reveal, well, 2023 might have been even worse. From Tina Turner to Silvio Berlusconi and Henry Kissinger, it was once again not a good year to be a public figure with the sniffles.

In fact, I’ve crunched the numbers to prove this.

Despite Prince (departed 2016) and Sinead O’Connor (departed last July) both famously claiming that “Nothing Compares 2 U”, they were very wrong. Because using the power of data science, we can directly compare people – including every celebrity that has bitten the dust over the last thirteen years.

And that’s why today I am publishing this important research paper, which concludes that contrary to the existing scientific consensus, 2023 was actually 27.84% worse for celebrity deaths than 2016.

How can I be so sure? Let’s go on a big cheery Christmas read about death, to find out how I did it¹.

Counting Dead Celebrities

So let’s start with the obvious question: How do we count the number of dead celebrities? And how do we define who counts as a celebrity?