The cartoonist and humorist Jaume Perich said that the antipathy he professed to José Luis Perales, omnipresent in his cartoons and television interventions, had a biographical origin: it began because the start of the singer’s career coincided with the moment in which Perich began to go bald and accumulate diopters. In a memorable meeting on the Àngel Casas Show on TV3 (in Catalan, and with Perales connected to a simultaneous translation earpiece), the singer showed that he was intelligent and, instead of being indignant, he accepted that ironic dialogue.
Now Perales has once again practiced irony when, from London, he has denied the information according to which he had just died of a stroke. He tells that he was having dinner with his son when he found out that he had died. So it should not be ruled out that denialists will soon begin to appear who will affirm that the Perales denial and dinner is a hologram manufactured by artificial intelligence.
Errors when announcing the death of a living celebrity are already a journalistic genre that from time to time raises the condition of exception to a category. Luckily, the information industry is rigorous and has always prepared obituaries that, with preventive respect, dignify the memory of an applicant who, due to age or poor health, is approaching the final phase.
In 2019, even a newspaper like Le Monde had to apologize for having published, in its digital version, the obituary of businessman Bernard Tapie, who would take two years to truly die. And The New York Times has admitted that it has a file of draft obituaries with 1,800 candidates.
Of all of them, however, I like the anecdote attributed to Jean-Luc Godard. They say that, already being ill, the filmmaker called the newspaper Libération and asked them to let him take a look at the obituary that, he knew, they had prepared. His intention was to correct possible inaccuracies and, I suppose, enjoy the privilege of knowing what they write about you when you are no longer part of this world. Elegantly but lying, the newspaper interlocutor told him that it was impossible to let him see any draft because it is a habit in bad taste and they would never lend themselves to such a morbid practice.
