A Pursuit This Sick Is Actually Very Healthy

Poor Joe West. He had put the finishing touches on his colorful “Catching Cunanan” office pool sign-up sheet: the fugitive’s photograph, physical description, an FBI seal, the FBI’s toll-free number and, of course, some fine print:

Cunanan will be considered captured once he is taken into custody or when his remains are found. All times Pacific. (Note: Friends and relatives of Cunanan may not play.)

West had just begun to circulate the pool--with its promise of a $160 jackpot--among colleagues at his business office in Culver City when the bad news arrived: Miami Beach police had surrounded a houseboat, a gun had gone off, and speculation was rife that the search for the suspected serial killer had ended.

Just try to sell a $5 spot in the pool with that kind of news breaking. “Catching Cunanan,” the pool, like the alleged killer himself, was dead in the water.

“Yeah, I got really stiffed on that one,” West says. And I was a little disappointed myself. West, who also reports the news at the radio station where I work, had persuaded me to chip in $5 on July 22, the day before Cunanan was found. I drew the 20th day of the month, a sure loser. How likely was it that Cunanan would remain at large for nearly another month?

Unfortunately, West had collected only $85, and, feeling responsible for the promised pot, shelled out the additional $75 to the winner. Could this be a case of instant karma, bad taste division? Maybe. But as West points out, “I didn’t call it ‘Killing Cunanan’ or ‘Will He Kill Again?’ or ‘How Many Will He Kill Before He Gets Caught?’ I would never get into one of those ‘dead pool’ things, because to tell you the truth, I’m a little superstitious. I think if you do that, you might die yourself.”

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Some call them dead pools, some call them ghoul pools, but the salient feature of each is this: Bettors wager on someone else’s demise or bad fortune. With dead pools, hopeful players list their moribund favorites at the start of the year. They’ll choose 10 or 12 names of celebrities expected to expire before the year is out.

A check of the newspaper database shows that dead pools and ghoul pools are played across the country--in offices, among friends, in groups, in twosomes, sometimes openly, sometimes in secret. Sometimes money changes hands, sometimes not. Sometimes players weight their scores according to the age or renown of a person on the list (for instance, more points are given for younger corpses and correct predictions about how a death will play in the press).

Twinges about tastelessness seem to strike players only when someone near and dear to them has died. But the twinges are fleeting.

And just as no one can account for the fact that perennial dead pool favorite Keith Richards still lives and breathes, no one can pinpoint the birth of the practice, either.

The pastime did, however, get a life-imitates-art-style boost in 1988 with the release of Clint Eastwood’s “The Dead Pool,” in which a psychotic serial killer (is there any other kind?) is inspired to real violence by the dead pool of a director of horror flicks.

“The dead pool is just a harmless game,” the director hisses at Dirty Harry when folks on his list start turning up dead.

“Sounds pretty sick to me,” Harry replies.

Exactly. And what’s wrong with sick?

Nothing, actually, say the experts, who invoke millennial anxiety, a fascination with violence, and resistance to the taboo surrounding death as explanations for the pools.

“Sick humor is cathartic,” says University of Connecticut professor Regina Barreca, an authority on humor. “You can’t make a joke about death and be in denial about it. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the thing exists. For instance, if you can make sex jokes, you can admit sex exists. Which is why you don’t make sex jokes with your parents.”

Dead pools, in particular, allow players to deal with what Barreca calls “one of the last taboo subjects in the world: death.”

People who are superstitious about death will not participate in a dead pool, she says. They might play “Catching Cunanan,” but they won’t be caught dead playing “Killing Cunanan.”

It might comfort them to learn that a search has turned up no recorded instance of poetic death befalling a dead pool player. Which doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. Or that it won’t.

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Asuperstitious nature has not prevented Joe West from circulating (for the third time) a pool he has dubbed “Mister Richter.”

The winner will correctly predict the day of the next California earthquake measuring 5.0 or higher on the Richter scale.

(Fine print advisory: Aftershocks don’t count. Employees of Caltech and their families are not eligible to enter.)

West reports that the jackpot has climbed to $400.

“We haven’t had a five pointer since March 18,” he says cheerfully. “Would you like to sign up?”

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears on Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is rabcarian@aol.com.