Three cheers for Craig Ferguson, who explained on his program why he wasn’t going to make jokes about Charlie Sheen anymore, which is because the dud is mentally ill. (This isn’t my armchair diagnosis, but that of my fried Dr. Howard Samuels, the noted therapist. “Charlie Sheen is a hardcore drug addict,” he said last week. “What’s been going on is typical of someone who smokes a lot of crack. For the first three to six months that the drug is leaving the system people are extremely grandiose, arrogant, entitled and angry.”
Anyway, Ferguson offered an historical parallel. “There was a mental hospital in London,” the brilliant Scots TV host said. “It’s been there for a very long time. It started as a priory in I think the 12th or 13th century. Anyway, it’s called Bedlam. And what happened was, in the 18th century, people used to go along and pay money — they would pay a penny — and they would look through the peepholes of the cells. And they would look at the lunatics and they would laugh at them. …So I’m looking at the Charlie Sheen thing unfold, and I’m thinking “Aw, man!” Naturally, his remarks drew a laugh, though rather less at Sheen’s expense than out of a shock of recognition.
One interesting thing about Sheen in this past week is how he has become a model of the new 21st century content provider–famous, followed, entertaining, news-breaking, brand-building–and free. Sheen is unemployed. He continues to make money from residuals, but the terms of that deal have been set. All the radio and TV programs whose ratings he has been boosting pay him nothing. He reached a million followers on Twitter faster than anyone, but this pays him nothing (reportedly he might tout products, which would earn him some money.) But on the whole, he has joined the bloggers at The Huffington Post and rabid YouTubers and everyone who posts comments and clips about Charlie Sheen on Facebook. We’re paying our pennies to Bedlam, and the lunatic ain’t getting paid.
Let’s see how long the goddesses roll with that arrangement.
And now–right after I praise Darrow‘s fab illustration in New York magazine–I join Craig Ferguson in establishing my blog as a Sheen-free sanctuary.