PSA for music fans: If your kids or another family member or friend tries to tell you your favorite musician just died, you might want to fact check the news before going into mourning.
There’s a new trend going around on TikTok, #fakecelebritydeath (currently with 16 million views), in which kids are pranking their parents telling them their beloved music stars and other celebrities have passed away and then videoing the reactions, which are actually quite entertaining. Perhaps it’s payback for all those years Jimmy Kimmel had parents pranking kids, telling them they ate all their Halloween candy.
But this twist really takes it up a level. One really cruel person told her mom that her favorite musician had died. After the mother, in a panic, incorrectly guessed Keith Richards and then Mick Jagger, her daughter said it was Ozzy Osbourne (not true), which elicited an extended gut-wrenching howl. “I think my mom never wants me back for Christmas dinner,” the TikToker captioned her post.
When another awful child tells her parents Rod Stewart “passed,” the mother just keeps repeating “bullshit” over and over while advancing in closer to the daughter filming the reaction.
This compilation video captures some of the best of the fake celebrity death pranks. A set of parents literally has their breath taken away when their child tells them, jokingly, that Cher died. A dad about flips out of his chair when he’s informed Howard Stern is “dead.” Another mom has to excuse herself from a family gathering when informed of Bon Jovi’s “death,” but the funniest has to be the reaction to hearing Dateline host Keith Morrison “passed away” in which a mother breaks down into a full squat, screaming at the horrible fate.
If you have a couple hours to spare during your post-holiday hangover, you can also see hilarious reactions to the fake death news of Barry Manilow, Reba McEntire (a popular pick who appears in several pranks), Dave Matthews, Darius Rucker, Paul McCartney and Ice Cube, among many others.
