If anyone could find the fact that the Internet believes them to be dead funny, leave it to a comedian like Gabriel Iglesias. It’s not rare for the Internet to decide that yet another celebrity has passed away and begin to spread false rumors, and while most people in this position either ignore the rumors or get offended by them, Gabriel Iglesias did not seem to be shaken by the events. Rather, the comedian was visibly amused.
The comedian expressed his thoughts on the matter in a Facebook post, where he took the rumor apart sentence by sentence, making fun of each statement in the hoax. The post saw a lot of attention (understandably), and Iglesias’s fans seemed to be just as amused by the situation as the comedian himself. In the same post, Iglesias also mocked several Twitter hashtags that were trending related to his death hoax, including #FarewellFluffy. Twitter has been one of the main platforms that helped this particular death hoax spread, and there has been speculation that the whole event originated on Twitter in the first place, although at this point it would be too difficult to tell.
At the same time, he took the opportunity to make a more serious remark in the post, stating that the events have made him consider how he spends the time in his life, and he has realized that he needs to be more grateful for the good moments that he has. While it’s a bit unusual for this realization to come to someone as the result of a false rumor about their own death, it’s still good to see such internal reflection from someone who normally rarely says anything serious at all.
While this is far from the first time that the Internet has believed a celebrity to be dead, this was one of the more prominent rumors of this type. The Twitter hashtag #FluffyDied managed to get quite a large number of posts made under it, and a lot of people were legitimately questioning whether the comedian had passed away. It didn’t help that Iglesias took some time to respond to the rumors, although it’s not clear exactly when he realized what was going on himself.
After writing the Facebook post, the comedian also took to Twitter to let his fans there know that he’s alive and well, although (perhaps not so surprisingly) that didn’t do much to stop the hashtag from gaining popularity, at least not immediately. Posts related to his alleged death continued to flood in for a while, although some were obviously jokes inspired by the statement made by Iglesias himself. The comedian has personally not responded to any of these posts himself.