Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Modern Funerals

Episode Date: December 16, 2020

The way we deal with our dead has changed a lot over the past 50 years. Learn all about it in 12-15 minutes right here. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Jerry's floating around out there somewhere

and Dave C is here in spirit. So the gang is all ready to go with short stuff. Let's talk about funerals, baby. Let's talk about you being dead. Let's talk about all the good things and the bad things that happened to your head after you die. Yeah. Man, we should just stop and end this episode

because it'll be the best episode in the history of the show. All right. Well, that's it for short stuff everybody. Short stuff is out. Oh wait, we gotta stop for an ad break. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, so we're talking about funerals

and we've talked a little bit about this stuff over the years in our death suite. And I think we actually did one on things to do with the dead body way back in the day. Oh yeah, we've talked a lot about this kind of stuff. But the notion that we're tackling today is that since the 1960s and up until the 1960s, Americans and especially American Christian people

had one kind of funeral and that was largely dictated, AKA shoved down our throats by the funeral industry. If you wanted to fit in in America, you had to be presented upon your death in a certain way. And that meant being embalmed, put in a suit or a dress, whatever your preference was, and be presented in a casket, usually open for like your friends and family

to dress in black and come kind of grieve over you. And it was a very solemn, unhappy affair. What was the last time, not to get too personal, but that you had to go to an open casket scene? I don't remember honestly. It's been a while for me. Yeah, I genuinely don't remember because it is kind of like old school,

but it still happens every once in a while. I don't remember, Chuck, but I mean, I have been ever since I was a little kid, my mom was like, it's time for you to learn about death. And I was like, I'm only two. She's like, yeah, it's a little late, frankly. Yeah, all I know is the last few that I've been to, and in fact, most that I've ever been to,

which haven't been that many, I have always just been like, do you wanna go up and say goodbye to your grandmother? And I've always been like, nope, I've done that in my head, in my heart. So I do not need to go see that weird powdery waxy figure that looks nothing like her in real life. Do you wanna go smell grandma's hair one last time?

Oh, God. Yeah, I've never been into it, and we're both kind of on record with that over our shows over the years. But this whole thing started to kind of change with a book in 1963 that I kind of wanna read now from Jessica Mitford called The American Way of Death, where she really kind of exposed the US funeral home industry

as being not so great. Yeah, basically she portrayed it as an entire industry built around taking advantage of people in a really predatory way during a really vulnerable moment when they're grieving, when they're at their weakest, these scales come in and start being like, well, of course you need this,

and the deceased would want that. The platinum package. And ch-ching, ch-ching, ch-ching, right? They got like the cash register dollar sign cartoon wolf eyes. That's basically how she portrayed it. It was a really, I think she wrote an article at first, and it got very little attention, and then it was turned into a book.

I think she went on TV and it ended up becoming a book and really had a huge effect on how people viewed funerals from that point on. Yeah, and I guess maybe we should just caveat this now and say if we have listeners that work in the funeral industry, we're not coming after you here. This was a book that was written in the 1960s, and we realized it's a business, a for-profit business,

and upselling is part of that business, and it just takes on a bit of a, I guess, sort of an untoward feeling when it's dealing with people while they're grieving, but that's also the business you're in. So I'm not just, I'm not slamming you if you work for, I have one across the street. They're very nice people.

I live across from a funeral home that's lovely, but having said that, stop it, no. Things have changed a lot over the years. In the 1960s, the cremation rate was 3%, which is astounding, and now it's 51%, and it's gonna go up to about 57 or 58% by 2022, it seems like. Yeah, and that was a big effect that Mitford had

with her book, The American Way of Death. It was like, you just did not get cremated before then, and then all of a sudden, and she, by the way, she had a very cheap funeral, including being cremated. I read that she spent less than, I think, $800 in today's dollars on her own funeral, but because of this, it kind of made it okay to not go through all this rigmarole and to not even preserve the body.

And I was reading about that, preserving the body, like there's this idea that had been around for a really long time, like, I don't know if it was so that you looked your best when God told everybody to stand up in their graves and be judged, or what? St. Peter? Yeah, yeah, that guy. But apparently, it was Abraham Lincoln that really

kicked off the American trend for embalming. He had his son embalmed, he was a big devotee of embalming, and then when he was embalmed, and he made a whistle-stop tour after death, that was the first time a lot of Americans ever saw an embalmed body, and it basically started this trend that lasted for a good century or more. Yeah, so let's take a break, and we'll talk about

kind of how this cultural shift fit in with all the other cultural shifts that were happening in the 1960s, right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult-classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so 1960s come along.

This book is written in the early 60s. The counterculture arrives. People start doing drugs, start exploring different kinds of spirituality, including what they think about the afterlife, and sort of one of the natural things that happened was funerals started to change a little bit, to compare, you know, to kind of lean toward more

what we think of them today in today's terms. Yeah, that was a big part of it. You know, this idea of, you know, taking acid and thinking about being embalmed is not, they don't really go hand in hand, you know what I'm saying? It's a really easy way to decouple yourself from the traditional ideas of funerals is to take LSD. I only inject heroin into my body ban, not formaldehyde.

Exactly. So that was a big part of it in addition to Mitford's book. I think her book came at a really like good time. Totally. I think it had an impact because the general awakening of people and the movement away from religion in a lot of ways, not necessarily away from spirituality, but you know, there's this guy that's interviewed

in this How Stuff Works article who is the, I think the Dean of Religious Studies at Emory University. So he's like Bigwood, you know what I'm saying? Gary Loderman. And he points out that if you are talking about religion, like religion's bread and butter, it's basic business is death in the afterlife. So it has all sorts of ideas and very clear guidelines

about how you're supposed to behave upon death and how your body's supposed to be treated upon death. And if you're religious, you follow those. But if as a country, America started to get less and less religious, those kinds of constrictions fell away too. Yeah. And you know, the idea that the other thing,

a big thing that's changed and changed things funeral-wise is it used to be very vague in your will. Like funerals were just kind of done one way. So when you died, that was expected. And starting in the 60s and definitely in the past couple of decades, people have gotten way, way more specific in what they want, like for their own funeral arrangements.

And it's leaned more toward, and they've even changed the nomenclature from funeral surface to memorial service. And then eventually the celebration of life. And things have just gotten a lot less rigid, a little lighter and more celebratory. Like don't wear black. I want you to play, you know, craft work.

And I want alcohol served. And I want it to be outdoors and scatter my ashes in my favorite dog park. And then Chuck, so if you're running a funeral home these days, you're trying to keep up with this crazy changing wacko time for how funerals are carried out, or sorry, celebrations of life are carried out.

You have to kind of get more creative now than you did before. And I came across a blog post on funeralone.com or funeralone.com, depending on how you want to say it. And it's, I think like 20-something creative ideas for a funeral. One of them, number 10 really sticks out to me. Now they point out, as long as it wasn't a tragic death,

you can insert a bit of humor by passing out mad libs for people to create about the deceased. Okay, sure. And I think it's smarter than the caveat that as long as it wasn't a tragic loss, because that definitely does kind of change the tone of something. Even today, even in today's, you know,

whacked out alcohol fueled celebrations of life, if it's a tragedy that led to the death, it's still gonna be pretty somber. This is typically for things like, you know, somebody who, I don't know where their death wasn't, wasn't a tragedy. I don't think there's really any other way to put it. Yeah.

What else you got? Number 14, create a memorial hashtag. Okay. Hashtag too soon? They give an example. Hashtag remember Grandma Smith, but they've shortened grandma to GMA. All right.

So it could also be remember good morning America Smith. I think it, we settled on, I know you've changed your mind since then, that you were gonna be shot out of a cannon or something. Yeah. And then I was always into the Sky Burial and Emily was just like, nah, like I'll make you into a tree, but I don't wanna want vultures eating you for God's sake.

Sky Burial is pretty hardcore, man, for sure. Yeah, I used to really be into myself, so I wanted to be shot out of a cannon. Now I'm like, I think I'd just rather be cremated and spread somewhere nice. Okay. So I've got one more for you. Yeah, what you got?

Number 17, celebrate life fun with bubbles. So you know, basically what they're saying is the funeral industry has gone into the wedding industry, wedding reception industry and said, we could translate a lot of these to these celebrations of life because they're both celebrations. That's kind of where we're at with funerals right now.

That's right. There's no wrong way to do it if you are still into an open casket and that traditional funeral service, there are certainly businesses that can accommodate that and we're not gonna yuck anyone's yum even in death. No, we're not, unless you fall for number 18, which is to host Icebreaker Games,

which it doesn't matter whether it's a corporate function, a wedding or a funeral, Icebreaker Games are horrible to everybody across the board. Just don't do that. No one wants to go out like that, yeah. Well, since Chuck said we'll judge you for that, that means that short stuff is done and short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production

of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.