"Pair up in threes" - Yogi Berra

The talented Mr Thomas

I was waiting for the 6th shoe to drop after Dick Gregory and Jerry Lewis passed on, and sad to say, I didn't have to wait for long. Jay Thomas, the storyteller, comic actor and radio host who made every holiday merry and bright through the traditional throwing a football at a meatball atop a Christmas tree after telling the Lone Ranger story, passed away last Thursday. If you haven't seen these holiday hi-jinx, here you go, and we'll be here when you get back.

It always seems to me that celebrities die in threes. Remember last holiday season, when George Michael, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds all went 1-2-3? In '09, it was Ed McMahon, and then, two days later, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett on the same day. And the article I was reading about this very thing mentioned that in 2006, James Brown, Gerald R. Ford, and Saddam Hussein all passed more or less together.  

I have to lodge a protest, though, at calling Saddam a "celebrity," a category that begins with "Comic Sandy Baron, who played Jack Klompus on 'Seinfeld,'" and closes with that orange guy who used to be on the Celebrity Accomplice or whatever it was called.

But a look back at the newspapers shows that Tommy Allsup of Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and Las Vegas entertainer Buddy Greco both passed in the first days of 2017.

So maybe it isn't really that celebrities die in threes, but that we stop counting at three, mourn that trio, and then go back to whatever we do when not watching Access Hollywood.

"Patterns in death, patterns in misfortune – those are things that help us try to understand the universe or reality in a way that makes sense of it," says John Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas. "In general, we’re very uncomfortable dealing with randomness."  Which is why we try to make order of chaos, and that is called apophenia, Hoopes says.

"Apophenia is identifying significant relationships when, in fact, they probably don’t exist independent of the observer," he says, for those of us who thought that Apophenia was the Greek Goddess of random events.