Richard Grieco Death Hoax Hoax

No, that's not a typo. 

This morning, when I read that last week's reports of Richard Grieco's death had been a hoax, I was immediately suspicious. See, like most people involved in marketing and PR, I live by Google alerts. And Google hadn't mentioned anything about Richard Grieco dying, or about there being a hoax claiming that Richard Grieco had died.  The first news I heard about the widespread hoax was this article about how it had all been a hoax.

And then there was this photo, which seemed a little odd since there is actually a Star Magazine, commonly referred to as Star Mag, which doesn't look like this.  And the fact that when I saved the photo, I got a template--on the site, Richard's face appears in the white space.

I did a quick search for the supposed memorial Facebook page and it didn't exist, but I didn't want to jump to conclusions.  Perhaps the page had been taken down when it emerged that the whole thing was a hoax.

But no.

A little more digging (okay, clicking a link in the middle of the article) revealed that the hoax hoax was meant to be parody (or satire, or something).  The whole site on which it appears, apparently, is a mock-news site dedicated to humor, much like The Onion or Andy Borowitz except...not funny or clever.

As near as I can tell (based on the site's own description, not just the stories that appear there), the "People" section is dedicated to posting fake celebrity news stories that look just like real celebrity news stories. The satire, apparently, is in the volume and repetitiveness.  So, if you're a regular reader, you can go, "Ha ha, yeah, that's the third celeb whose dog has had paw-replacement surgery this week!"  If, however, you just land on a random article, it's likely to be entirely indistinguishable from a real news article.  They've entirely left out the elements of absurdity or exaggeration that distinguish satire from what passes today for straight news.

At least, that's how it seemed to me.  I'm apparently wrong, though, as the site information assures me that "all stories are obviously not true."  Opinions may vary, but many of the comments seemed to agree with me, including some that expressed honest confusion as to whether particular stories were true or not.

Anyway...don't worry. Richard Grieco is not dead, and also, no one ever thought he was.