Ashton to Ashes

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

It hasn’t been a good year or so for my ideal younger man, Ashton Kutcher.  This breaks my heart because I do wish him all the best, in a concerned, fatherly way.  First came his split with Demi, then his stint on Two and a Half Men, a show he is being credited with killing, although I see that more as a kindly act of euthanasia; I agree with Charlie Sheen: TAAHM kinda sucks.  Now he has managed to outrage some members of the Indian community by appearing in “brown face” in an ad for PopChips, and he has been roasted alive on Twitter, a social media platform he in no small part helped to build.

This poses something of a conundrum for performers in general and the people who create material for them: at what point does satire become offensive and racist?  Are actors, comedians specifically, only allowed to appear as their race or, in the case of repeat-offender Sacha Baron Cohen, as something other than their real sexuality?

Ho Down in Dallas

TUTTLE MODE

by James Tuttle

Gentle reader,

You were probably as eager as I was for this week’s premiere of Bravo’s Most Eligible Dallas, even with its clunky title.  Unfortunately, the pompous, self-important silliness in the introductory monologues makes about as much grammatical sense.  Within the first two minutes, resident ladies’ man Matt introduces himself with these memorable lines:  “If you want to hate on me for, uh, being a, duh, single guy…twenty-eight, uh…in town?  Fine, do it!”  What the hell?  No, Matt, people aren’t “hating on you” for being single or being twenty-eight.  They hate you for being a dick.  Also, your eyebrows are too far apart.  They might hate you for that, too.

Not a cast member. Unfortunately.

The other cast members don’t fare much better.  Glenn is a football player with an amazing body and a not-so-amazing face who, he tells us, has so much testosterone coursing through him that he can’t watch Family Feud with his mom without getting an erection.  Ick.  And Courtney looks like one of the big Kardashians—you know how Kardashians come in small and large sizes—and makes up words like “incestual.”