Death isn’t always funereal fun and games, of course, and if recent years have seen a cultish trend toward mixing some whimsy with welcome celebratory salutes to notables and Ordinary Joes alike, it hasn’t been at the expense of well-considered compassion and thoughtfulness. The Dead Beat, then, is more than a compendium of death notices designed to tickle your fancy-free sense of cheek and irreverence. Marilyn Johnson has admirably taken a systematic, cohesive, and comprehensive approach to the subject - from attending the Sixth Great Obituary Writers’ International Conference that was, um, fortuitously capped off with the “harmonic aspect to its timing” of Ronald Reagan’s death (“Forgive us, but this is what we live for”), to the irreverence of internet afterlife in “Googling Death,” a “messy frontier” tantamount to Grand Central for ghouls, rumor-mongers and professional journalists.

But before we reach that online horizon, Johnson gives us a deft historical overview of obituaries as they have traditionally evolved in newpapers, noting that, like poetry, they’ve had their flowery period, a bleak epoch, and modern era -- the latter age a time that fortunately for the most part left some of the 19th-century gruesomeness behind: “Within the short period of a year she was a bride, a beloved wife and companion, a mother, a corpse!” But since then, morbid-mania has gripped the United States and the United Kingdom after a shake-up in the 1980s when “the equivalents of Elvis and the Beatles rose up" to write today's tributes. Due to this time of dynamic expansion, innovation, and yes, entertainment, “a boring, moldy form has sprung to life.”

In addition to and in the course of chronicling the form the obituary has taken in such American newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post and in the UK’s essential “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" — The Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the Independent — Johnson provides an analytical methodology to the study of the today's more go-go forward-looking obituary, the structure of which consists of such intriguing elements as the phrase, the tombstone, and the song and dance, none of which are to be overshadowed by the necessity of colorful quotes sprinkled throughout.

More than just padding out an obit, quotes exist to communicate the quintessential and crucial inner workings of the dearly or not so dearly departed. “Imagine a round table,” Johnson explains, “and the people who knew the deceased standing up, rapping on their glasses with a spoon, and saying something that fills in the blanks, directly or indirectly.”