by H.G. Hess

Created on: April 19, 2007   Last Updated: May 15, 2007

Are we really that sick of celebrity news? I really couldn't tell, given the endless supply of celebrity information found on shows like Extra and Entertainment Tonight, the E! channel, gossip rags like the National Enquirer and the hundreds of celebrity blogs, amateur ones like asocialiteslife.com and ones like TMZ hosted by big companies like AOL. So how could we be sick of celebrity news while gorging so much of this information? Maybe we aren't sick of celebrity news, maybe just certain stories.

Take Anna Nicole's death/son's death/Dannielynn's custody trial/all kinds of super-tragic nonsense related to this deceased former Playmate. This was headline news for quite a bit, upstaging the war in Iraq and who knows what else! We never get sick of celebs crawling in and out of rehab to clean up their wild images and poor reputations. I guess we enjoy seeing them writhe in their own misery, but not up and dying on us.

If we were truly sick of celebrity news, we would all stop watching, reading, gawking at pictures of nipple slips and upskirts. We'd ignore Lindsay Lohan and relish in the good old days when she was a cute tween in the Parent Trap remake. It's not that we don't have lives. It's that we want to escape the stress of our lives by watching these annoyingly priviledged self-absorbed fame mongers make tons of boo-boos in public so we can laugh.

So maybe we aren't sick of celebrity news period. Maybe we just tire of it borderlining morbidity. We want to be entertained and amused, not shed tears for these strange, hysterical, drug addicted Hollyweirdos. The buck stops for us average people when we see starlit tragedies. Instead, we prefer to just watch them suffer every once and again.

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