How Six Degrees Became a Forever Meme

more succinct and pointed...

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

1 Degree:
Churchill, Montgomery, Eisenhower, Nixon, JFK, LBJ, Reagan, Carter/LeMay
De Gaulle - whom I should have kicked in the shins when he kicked NATO out of France - nothing against Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho,
but it is not Paris / McNamara - I should have kicked him in the shins also and told him wars on not Statistical Exercises/Kerensky - why didn't you take the Soviets more Seriously !/ Franco - not very tall/ Shah of Iran and this third wife - quite stunning/Elizabeth R and family/Little Richard/Sam Cooke/Elvis/Chuck Berry/the Animals/Supremes/Temps/Four Tops/Martha and the Vandellas
The Beatles/Stones/but not Bob Dylan//Bowie/Sinatra and Nat Cole/
The Mick/Willy/Bob Feller/Brooks Robinson/Jim Palmer/Stan Musial/
Frank Robinson/Bob Gibson/Ezzard Charles /Liston /Patterson /Ali /Louis/Walcott/Frazier - thanks for the "soft left hook" that day at your gym in Philly/George Foreman/Elgin Baylor - still the greatest Basketball Player of all Time/Marlyn Monroe/Clark Gable/Richard Burton/Liz/
Ava Gardner/Sophia Loren/Alec Guinness/Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr
- who deserved to win all six of her Oscar Nominations/
John Huston/Hitchcock/Carol Reed
but
never
Kevin Bacon.

You only have to live in Manhattan for about 10 years to meet dozens of "famous" people at parties. You dont even have to try. And the more you are involved in "creative" fields, the more likely you will meet more famous people. The six degrees thing implodes if you socialize in Manhattan.

It would be interesting to examine a tighter version of this. Reading the comments, it's all "Once I stood next to a guy who once had a sandwich at the same coffeeshop X was in." But the original Milgram experiment required people to have sufficient acquaintance to ask a favor; they had to hand an envelope over to someone who had a better chance of getting it to someone else who could eventually get it to the final recipient across the country. How strong are our social networks? For instance, if I needed to get an introduction to someone for work or for medical reasons, would I be able to manage it? I can't help being curious.

At my son' s wedding my new daughter-in-law's father had gone to school with Bob Dylan brother, therefore giving me 6 degrees of separation from Bob Dylan! That thought has been my claim to fame for the last 5 years! l
Lucky me!

Just calculated my number and it is "infinity," unless you count pets, in which case it's "infinity +1." By the way, I love this game.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that one of Kevin Bacon's cousins was Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, one of Adolf Hitler's prominent early supporters. After the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler hid in Putzi's attic, where Putzi's wife talked Hitler out of committing suicide. And it was Putzi who edited Mein Kampf. Bacon and Putzi's common ancestor is John Sedgwick, a Union general during the Civil War, and Bacon's wife Kyra Sedgwick is also related to General Sedgwick, which was documented on Henry Louis Gates's ancestry series on PBS around five years ago. And for good measure, I knew someone who met Putzi in 1936.

I have often thought that the Seinfeld writers used the New York-ness of Six Degrees of Separation to its full potential.

Also see Annie Baker's Pulitzer-winning "The Flick."

Sorry guys, but I once got to spend an hour talking with Muhammad Ali, which pretty much connects me to every major athlete in the world except maybe Nascar drivers, as well as every world leader from Chou en Lai to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu to Barrack Obama, some other American presidents, many, many world leaders,Popes, the Dalai Llama, movie stars, politicians and no doubt Kevin Bacon is in the mix somewhere. But, best of all I got to spend an hour with Muhammad Ali when he was young and beautiful and witty and charming.

Yes, it always amazes me that people read Ouisa's rapturous comments about the six degrees as a serious statement of interconnectedness. In the play, her monologue comes right after--and is ironically undercut by--several scenes in which it is clear that she has no idea about the lives of her own (rather bratty) children. Maybe connectedness should start at home?

Moreover, as other writers have noted here, the six degree thing is pretty much a joke, because (1) most of us are easily "connected" to famous people and (2) that doesn't make us close to them in any way that matters. I'm two connections away from Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, and so that also links me to all the political leaders of the world--for starters. But have I ever met the Clintons? No. So in what meaningful sense am I more connected to them than I am to my own family and friends?

Mr. Guare may modestly call his play an "antique," but I think it remains a brilliant analysis of what connection between people really means--and of the mistake that we make when we neglect the people our real lives by putting far too much meaning in imagined connections with people we will likely never meet.

(By the way, I saw this play many years ago with Marlo Thomas as Ouisa, and it was one of the great theater experiences of my life.)

My movie pitch: an actor (or director) who consciously tries to keep their Bacon number high out of snobbery, choosing only obscure indy projects, eventually having to kill someone from a former indy picture who gets a role to star in a film beside (you guessed it) Kevin Bacon...

After the murder, for which they are of course convicted, it turns out Bacon was an uncredited extra on the murderer's first picture.

But I still need a title...

I know an Anglican priest who has met the former Archbishop of Canterbury. That gives me 2 or 3 degrees of separation from The British Royal family, Nelson Mandala, the Pope and probably every American president over the past 60 years!
Incredible!

I was in an abusive relationship many years ago, this was in Germany; that former partner was the son of a man who used to work at a concentration camp under the supervision of a man called Adolf.

And the mother of a friend used to see a clinician in the 1950s, this was in Mexico City. One day the clinician did not show up for a pre-scheduled appointment, and later apologized for missing the session. The physician had to attend the funeral of one of his patients. My friend's mother later learned who the dead patient was: Frida Kahlo.

In any particular world (say science), it is usually "one degree of separation" and you don't even have to go through Kevin Bacon!

Well I met Barack Obama when he was first running for the senate at small fundraiser at a friends house ( it was not Bill Ayers house lol). And I was in charge of collecting donation cards at big event my boss ran so I sat with James Carville and Mary Matalin. I guess that gives me one or two degrees of separation from every living President. And three from JFK.

I want to play. I knew Stan Getz, whose wife Monica hailed from Sweden. Her dad was good friends with Hermann Goring (umlaut over the "o".) During WWII, Hermann worked for a guy named Adolf.

Thanks.

And let us not forget the Kander and Ebb song about one Shirley Devore, who had to travel round the world to meet the guy next door.

I was looking in a store window on Columbus Avenue one day and a man came up beside me. I looked at him and guess who it was? I'm a one. I calculate that in the time it takes you to read this, I may have five seconds of fame let.

I love the Oracle of Bacon page, and I'm fascinated by its list of which actors might be better "centers" of the Hollywood universe.

Look at the list on that page. 1,000 "best" centers of the universe. You have to pass by some complete unknowns (Rance Howard? Richard Riehle?) before you finally stumble on the first woman - Sally Kirkland of all people, at #41.

The next woman? Susan Sarandon, at #68. To get to her you have to pass by such universally recognized talents as Michael Papajohn and Thomas Rosales, Jr.

The top 100 "centers of the Hollywood universe" list is saved from the indignity of being just 2% female by Karen Black, who slips in at #97. Women start to bubble up a little more once you get into the higher hundreds.

Has anyone used this bizarre data set to do some research on the career paths and prospects of men vs women in Hollywood?

This seems like a silly parlor game or some kind of "one-ups-man-ship" game at a social gathering or a bar. I can claim one degree of separation from Jesse Owens and Al Oerter, two degrees of separation from Christy Mathewson, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, and three degrees of separation (may only two) from Albert Einstein. What does that indicate about me as a person? Absolutely nothing!

Based on one or both of America"s original sins (I.e., genocide of native Americans and slavery of African Americans) perhaps we should be talking about "six degrees of reparations."

This is not dissimilar to the idea that you need only 23 people selected at random in a room for the probability to be 50% that two of them will share the same birthday. Six is not a statistical upper limit (there could not mathematically be a precise number - what if you had a tribe of 100 somewhere which has never had any outside contact - but it probably represents the highest practical probability.

I'm 2 degrees from Momar Khadafi, Michele Obama, the President of France, and Mathew Broderick. = Totally meaningless.

Kevin Bacon entered the fray only as a parody of the original meme, which was already circulating in 1987, when I first heard it. The funny rhyme of "Separation"/"Kevin Bacon" made that next degree irresistible.

" it was the stickiness of his title — and the 1993 film version, starring Will Smith as the impostor — that blasted it “into the pop-culture stratosphere,” this is incorrect. it was the Kevin Bacon Game that was responsible for six degrees going viral. the movie had nothing to do with it.

With LinkedIn's algorithms, you don't even have to have face contact and there are fewer degrees of separation.

“I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people”. Actually I think six degrees were supposed to be the AVERAGE separation, not the upper limit.

It's really quite easy. My friend Scott has a friend, John, who was a dancer/extra in the movie "Footloose," starring Kevin Bacon. In this case, three degrees of separation.
My brother met up with Bill Clinton while jogging on the San Diego beaches in 1994. Two degrees of separation. I suppose if I included Hillary, that would be make it three degrees.
It's all pretty random, really, but a fascinating way to pass the time.

it's a very simple and astonishing concept...i worked at MIT in my teens. My boss knew Jerome Wiesner, who knew JFK, who knew Nikita Khruschev. See?