Tag Archives: abe vigoda

RIP Abe Vigoda – The Rumors of His Demise Are No Longer Greatly Exaggerated

When I was a little boy, I loved watching Barney Miller with my Dad and Fish was one of the funniest characters. I didn’t really see and understand The Godfather until I was into my teens, so Fish is my biggest memory of the man. People Magazine accidentally reported him as dead in 1982  and a reporter did it in 1987 as well. And you gotta admit, he looked ancient in the 1970s when he was playing Detective Phil Fish on Barney Miller and so the joke that Abe Vigoda wasn’t really dead went on for decades.

David Letterman had a great skit where they even had Abe Vigoda breathe on a mirror in 1988 to prove that he was still alive, as well as a later one where he tries to contact the actor’s ghost in a mock seance only to have him appear and call Dave a pinhead.

I remember first looking at IsAbeVigodaDead.com and thinking it was hilarious in 1996 because I was young and stupid. It was the first real novelty site I saw on the Internet because it’s sole purpose was was to let people know if the actor was still with us or has passed on. Well, today, January 26th, 2016 he finally did pass on at the ripe age of 94 years old.

With people making jokes about his death for over thirty years, that’s gotta be some kind of record. Firefox even released a joke web browser extension in 2005 to answer the question of whether or not he was still alive.

Someone made a parody of Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” and had that song linked from the website abevigoda.com – that’s right, someone took his name for a dot.com and then just made it about whether he was still alive or not. I don’t care who you are, that’s some dark business.

Never has the twilight of someone’s career been so defined by the question of whether or not they’re dead, and he handled it with a ton of grace.

So RIP Abe Vigoda, you were great in The Godfather as well as Barney Miller and got to live a nice long life, so thanks!