By Greg Lehman

Daily Titan Staff Writer

Halloween has its roots in a few different places.

Some believed that dressing up as spirits would protect them from the restless souls that wandered the night.

Today we dress up in costumes and go out and try to have the best time we can on the one night it is excusable to be skanky, scary and, at times, even offensive.

Unless you’re just waking up from a six-month coma to read this, you might have noticed that a lot of celebrities have been dying lately.

According to the laws of probability, these things are bound to happen; good and bad things occur in clusters and occasionally those clusters can get pretty big.

Walter Cronkite, Patrick Swayze, John Updike and Farrah Fawcett among others, will all be missed.

The families of these people suffer the most, and we as the public look on and might be reminded of our own mortality.

Then comes Halloween.

Party invitations stream in, and we wonder what we are going to be this year. Do we risk offense and put on our Billy Mays beards and hit the town?

Mays’ own son set up a contest this year where the best Mays look-alike would win various Mays-related prizes, including a tub of OxiClean.

Is it all right to poke fun at the dead?

We can go too far. A picture sprang up online last year of a young man wearing a Virginia Tech T-shirt riddled with bloody bullet holes.

Whenever someone gets offended by something said in jest, we should ask ourselves who we are offending, what is at risk if we continue offending them and why we are doing it ourselves.

Is dressing up like a dead celebrity wrong? In some ways, it can be disrespectful. Yet the basis of most humor is a put-down of some kind, an offense at someone else’s expense.

Halloween, in many ways, is a way to laugh at death, the night to make a joke out of death and have a blast while doing it.

Different people have different definitions of what they find appropriate or tasteful, and of course, these boundaries are going to be pushed and even violated at times.

With so much fertile material with over a dozen well-known celebrities recently passing, can we really put a limit on people dressing up as the King of Pop?

Would we ever be able to have fun if we always kept ourselves from laughing?

I do not think so, and I think we have to run the risk of getting offended if we truly want everyone to have an opportunity to celebrate as they see fit.

By Brittny Ulate

Daily Titan Detour Editor

Wearing costumes of recently-deceased celebrities is usually a safe bet for getting a good laugh, but if you stop to think about it, it isn’t worth it.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when that person is recently deceased, it becomes less an act of flattery and more an act of mockery.

It’s in good taste in general to keep jokes about dead celebrities to a minimum right after they pass away.

The same code of conduct should be upheld when choosing what you’re going to parade about town in on Halloween.

Not all of the costumes of dead celebrities were in bad taste this year. Michael Jackson definitely lives on thanks, in part, to his many admirers who thrilled the night away as the King of Pop. These were cases of flattery and sincere appreciation for a man who revolutionized pop music.

Billy Mays on the other hand, not so much. What was the purpose of dressing up as the semi-celebrity salesman? If he wasn’t dead, nobody would have dressed up as him, so the fact that people did it now seems like a sign of disrespect.

According to a People.com article, Mays’ son, Billy Mays III is fine with people dressing up as his father for Halloween. He even held a contest to find the best look-alikes of his father.

But just because the son endorses the imitators doesn’t make it right. He knew the costumes would be inevitable, even if he didn’t like people dressing up as his father, people would still do it. So instead of getting upset about it, he decided to embrace it.

Celebrities as costumes isn’t a bad idea. I’m all for seeing the Lucille Balls, Elvis Presleys and Marilyn Monroes strut their stuff on the streets. It crosses the line when these celebrities have passed away recently and the only reason they are costume ideas is because of their death.

By dressing as Mays, we sensationalize his death and bring more attention to the fact that he’s gone, something I’m sure his family doesn’t need to be reminded of.

I was surprised this year when I didn’t run into someone dressed as David Carradine, especially the postmortem version. The unusual circumstances surrounding his death would have made it prime material for ridicule, which I would not put past people to try.

The line should be drawn when it comes to the recently departed. These people are no longer around to defend themselves, and even if ridicule doesn’t hurt them anymore, it might affect their family. It’s something to take into consideration before gluing on that fake beard and walking around with a tub of OxiClean.