The beloved chef’s admirers have given him a distinctly modern kind of digital afterlife — at the center of fondly parodic jokes.
Bourdain’s deification feels like something fresh: a parasocial relationship in which the living, yearning for a man who felt like a friend, try to commune with him via parody.
Colleagues said he frequently imagined himself at the center of a movie, in which he was the star; today we might say that he helped invent “main-character energy.” He had a Google alert for his own name set to push notifications.
That people have taken the beloved character he constructed and turned it into a beloved caricature is no surprise. It is a natural progression: Man becomes character, and character becomes meme.
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