Personally, I’ll cut zombie-whacker, Satanic Cult breaker-upper and The Starship Enterprise’s Number One Fan Simon Pegg a lot of slack simply for the fact that he occasionally stands upright and doesn’t wave his hand around constantly watching rainbow-colored trails after the gargantuan quantities of Mary Jane he must have smoked in 1999, 2000 and 2001.
But for what it’s worth, Aunt Pegg hereby lends credence to a developing law of nature known as Roche’s Celebrity Prank Dictum: Celebrities who pull pranks do so lamely. Then their non-pranks get reported as if they were news.
So let’s report this as if it were news, shall we?
In an interview with Shortlist Magazine, as related by Bloginity, Pegg related that he “pranked” his Twitter followers by implying he might have been abducted by aliens. To wit:
“I tweeted one morning that my attic was open and I didn’t know why. I did know why, it was a faulty catch. Everyone was going, ‘Oh, that’s really creepy’. So then I started to lie. I tweeted that my dog was sitting underneath it barking.
“Then I said, ‘I’m going to go up there and check it out. I’ll be back in five minutes.’ And I didn’t come back for two days.
“The only thing I tweeted after disappearing was this phrase in Ancient Greek, ‘They’re my children now and you will never see them again’.”
Okay…look, once again I find myself having to explain this. Comprehending the term “prank” does not seem like rocket science to me — but then, I am not a journalist. Were I one, maybe I would have similar ambiguity between the concepts “prank” and “not prank,” which they seem to teach you to mix up at Captain Asshat’s School of Journalism.
Tweeting that you are abducted by aliens is not a Twitter prank. Tweeting something weird — no matter how weird — does not constitute a “prank.” The phrase in Ancient Greek edges it very slightly into prank territory, but only if he actually translated it into Ancient Greek, which I’m guessing he did not. At best, the technical term for it is “sending a mildly amusing tweet,” which doesn’t seem like news, since it happens fairly often. It is not, I repeat, a prank.
Claiming to have planted bombs in celebrities’ trunks? That’s a prank. I’m not saying it’s funny or in good taste. It’s actually sort of a low-impact war crime, now that I think about it. But then, since when are war crimes and pranks mutually exclusive? It’s definitely a prank.
In much the same way, Kim Kardashian was recently lauded for another “Twitter prank” and proclaimed “Queen of Hacking” by her Queen of What Exactly? sister Khloé Kardashian after (oh my stars! Hang on to your nutsacs here! You could end up with a hernia!) Kim actually sat down at the computer and tweeted as Khloé. OMG! How did she ever think to do that?!?!?
Guess what? My sister likes me, too. When I tell knock knock jokes, she busts a gut. Let’s fire off a press release, shall we?