Poor old Patrick Swayze. To hear your own obituary once is bad enough. But now he’s heard it twice, which seems a little extravagant.
And it’s all thanks to our old friend the internet. Yesterday afternoon an announcement on a Florida radio station led to internet reports claiming that Patrick Swayze had lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. This in turn led to a tidalwave of sad-face emoticons on Twitter – officially the greatest sign of bereavement that the internet is sanctioned to use.
Thing is, though, Patrick Swayze hadn’t died – of anything – and now he’s a little bit pissed off.
We know three stone-cold facts about Patrick Swayze. 1) For him to survive pancreatic cancer for this long is a testament to both medical science and his own tenacity. 2) When Patrick Swayze does die, people will claim that they enjoy his movies more than they really do, because most of them are rubbish. 3) Patrick Swazye isn’t dead.
The third one is possibly the most important. Patrick Swayze isn’t dead. He absolutely isn’t dead. If you see Patrick Swayze today and decide to poke him with a stick to see if he’s dead, he’ll break the stick in two and put both parts in your bottom as punishment. Do dead people do that? No they don’t. Because they’re dead. Patrick Swayze, on the other hand, isn’t dead.
That didn’t stop the internet exploding into life yesterday afternoon, though, after it was reported that Patrick Swayze had passed away in hospital. The rumours originally stemmed from KISS FM in Jacksonville, Florida, but then quickly spread onto gossip sites and then onto Twitter, where anyone will believe any old bollocks so long as it’s accompanied by one of those sad face colon-parenthesis things.
And how did the fully-alive Patrick Swayze react to the news that he’d just died? By leaping inside the body of Whoopi Goldberg to try and remind Demi Moore how much he loved her? Sadly not. He just got his publicist to release a mardy statement instead. BBC News reports:
Annett Wolf said the star, who is battling pancreatic cancer, was alive and well and responding to treatment. Wolf’s statement read: “This is to confirm that Patrick Swayze did not pass away this morning contrary to severely reckless reports stemming from a radio station in Jacksonville, Florida. Patrick Swayze is alive, well and is enjoying his life and he continues to respond to treatment.”
This is the second time that Patrick Swayze has had to go through this unsettling ordeal. The first came right after his diagnosis with cancer, when his friends and co-stars reflected on his life in the past tense to whichever television camera was nearest to them. And now this.
Honestly, when is Patrick Swayze going to get the message? If people are saying he’s dead then maybe he should act dead in order to spunk away his life insurance payout on a bloody great speedboat. It’s what we’d do. And it wouldn’t take much, either – just a couple of accomplices, a few weeks of hiding and the dead body of Richard Gere. We’re always getting those two mixed up.
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Joke Police says
No-one puts Swayze in the coroners.
Shooty* says
I’m not touching this one.
Laurie says
i really dont think you people are very nice by spreading untrue stories so stop it. i dont think you would like it if some one went around the web and the world saying that you were dead and let you see you obituary in the paper or on the internet. you are very very bad people. so you need to get your stories straight before you put it any where around the world.
laurie
jcm969 says
U idiots…Patrick will be dead very very soon…I saw my Dad and brother die from pancreatic cancer up close and personal..it ain’t pretty…all u idiots shut up and let the poor man die in peace with dignity…it won’t be very long at all then u vultures can pick his poor dead bones.