The Curse of the Simpsons!
16 May 2013
There are two types of Gen-Xers, those that can quote a Seinfeld reference for any occasion, and those that can quote a Simpsons line for any occasion. I happen to be a Simpsons Gen-Xer. Not that there's anything wrong with being a Seinfeld fan, I just couldn't get into it after my parents demanded I explain the "Deloris" episode. The other great inter-X-Gen schism is if The Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby! is U2's greatest album**.
Over the years, the Simpsons have had numerous celebrity guests. A rather shocking statistic is that 57 of those guests have died after appearing on the Simpsons. Upon seeing that I thought, "Wow, that's a surprisingly large number of dead celebrities!", followed shortly by, "How can we get the Kardashians to appear on the Simpsons?"
Of course, 57 deaths doesn't sound nearly as bad when you consider the show has been going for 24 seasons and featured over 570 guests. But I thought it would be fun to see how many celebrity deaths we should expect from the Simpsons. Is there really a "Curse of the Simpsons"?
Wikipedia has a handy list of all the Simpsons' guest stars . Wikipedia also has a standardized format for listing a person's birth and death date, so I just wrote a python script to grab all the info and ended up with a list of names, birth year, death year, and season people appeared on the show. Next up, I grabbed an actuarial table from the US government and made a table of death probabilities for each guest star each year. Finally, I did a little Monte Carlo simulation to see how many guests die on average each year.
Results:
Here's a plot of how many total guest stars have died through the years:
Now we add in how many deaths the actuarial table says we should see, along with dashed lines showing some of the most extreme results
It turns out, rather than 57 deaths being a lot, it's far fewer than we should have expected. The actuarial tables say there should have been 83 dead celebrities by now! I've also drawn in the 99th and 1st percentile lines, and the observed result is lower even than that. To get a good fit to the data, I can just shift the simulated curve 3 years like so:
So there is no curse, celebrities who appear on the Simpsons live about an extra 3 years (on average at least). If we look at the ages Simpson guests have been dying, the average is 76 years, with some folks pushing 100.
[caption id="attachment_15" align="alignright" width="168"]
I am the Eggman![/caption]
As a sanity check of the code, I looked to see how many surviving Beatles were predicted (George, Paul, and Ringo have all done guest voices). In 44% of the sims, all three survived, but in 42% at least one died (matching reality, Paul
and Ringo are currently the only surviving Beatles), and 13% of the time 2 had died. Finally, in 1% of the sims there were no surviving Beatles by 2013. This matches the manual calculation from the actuary table.
To explain what's going on, we just need to turn to this USNews article that asks Do Rich People Live Longer? Short answer: Yes. I used an actuarial table for average Americans, but celebrities who appear on the Simpsons are usually quite wealthy. Looking at the numbers in the USNews article, people in the upper half of the earnings distribution live 2.7 years longer than average, almost the exact shift that we see between the simulation and observations.
I really like this because the result was unexpected. I thought I'd find Simpsons' guests were dying off at the average rate--maybe just a tad faster than average since there have been several stars who died relatively young (Michael Jackson, Phil Hartman, Gary Coleman). I figured there would be a subtle, but not statistically significant Curse. Instead, it turns out there's a very significant anit-Curse. I made some jokes on twitter that perhaps Justin Bieber would be the next to fall to the Curse of the Simpsons. Now that seems especially silly. Even if Justin manages to spend away his fortune, he can still get amazing healthcare as a Canadian. Unless we continue to reform American healthcare, you it's a good bet Bieber will outlive many of his American fans.
I bet a similar effect would show up for other celebrity groups (Academy Award winners, SLN hosts, etc.). I wonder if pro-atheletes also have longer lives, or if their shorter careers or physical wear and tear prevent them gaining an advantage. Fun things to look at in the future if I ever need to boost blog traffic with misleading sensationalist headlines again.
All this thinking about mortality can be a little depressing though. Don't worry, there's a Simpsons reference for that.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="191"]
"See, I made a graph. I make lots of graphs."
Me too Lisa, me too.[/caption]
**The correct answer is Achtung Baby! Also note U2 were on the Simpsons in Season 9.