The absolutely batshit day Stephen Hawking faked his own death
Being one of the smartest people of your generation doesn’t often guarantee you a sense of humour, but, just like he was in so many ways, Stephen Hawking was an outlier.
Not content with being arguably the most revered scientific mind of his generation, the Oxford-born polymath was also a dab hand with a joke. Which, in a way, checks out.
Professor Hawking would have been the first to tell you that, in terms of sheer intelligence, there were many people who could rival him on that front. What set him apart from those peers was the fact that he wasn’t just able to understand those concepts but communicate them to laymen as well.
To me, that’s the truest sign of intelligence of all. It’s one thing to understand things yourself. To help other people understand them, especially when they’re almost certainly nowhere near your level of smarts, without ever talking down to them? That goes beyond being clever to something like real life magic and one of the ways Hawking did this was by being, as much as anything else, a funny little fucker.
This was a man who was once asked about his IQ and responded, “Boasting about your IQ is for losers”. He was a key part of Monty Python’s reunion tour in 2014 and had an absolutely wonderful turn on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. The man knew his reputation and could spin absolute gold out of it. Not for nothing did Stephen Hawking make multiple appearances as himself in The Simpsons
How did Stephen Hawking fake his death?
However, all those guest appearances in TV shows and live shows were almost certainly scripted to the letter. The best example of Hawking’s sense of humour comes from a story that BBC reporter Pallab Ghosh recalled in the aftermath of Professor Hawking’s death in 2018. He wrote about going to interview the great man in 2004, travelling up to his office in Cambridge with a BBC TV crew in tow.
Hawking arrived as the crew were setting up, and while putting the finishing touches on, they needed to make a last-minute adjustment. “The camera operator I was with… asked Prof. Hawking’s staff if he could pull out one of the plugs in the office so that he could use the socket for his equipment. Without waiting for a response he pulled the plug and the room was filled with a deafening siren.”
Now, that would be startling enough. What made it much, much worse was the fact that Hawking himself slumped forward in his wheelchair. As Ghosh said, “I feared that my colleague had inadvertently unplugged a vital piece of life-support equipment. Fortunately, it was the alarm to the uninterruptible power supply to his office computer and he was slouched forward with mirth at our incompetence.”
Fortunately, Ghosh was invited back many times for an interview. After all, there were few things in life that Stephen Hawking liked more than a good laugh. He probably sense that many more were to be had with Ghosh and his company. Only slightly at his expense.