Celebrity Baiting: The Sport of Kings

More on: This is Just for Fun Week.

Celebrity watching is the premiere spectator sport of our time. Celebrity baiting is a subcategory of the celebrity watching in the same way that golf is an sedentary subcategory of actual exercise. However, while unadorned, boring exercise is far more entertaining than golf, celebrity baiting is a lot more fun than just watching.

Given that, it's time to talk about Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman. Jimmy Kimmel is a relatively well know comedian and writier and has his own talk show: Jimmy Kimmel Live. Sarah Silverman is an absurdist comedian who has been mining the annoyance vein for a long time-- a toned down Fran Drescher with a brain. She has her own show: The Sarah Silverman Program. Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman have/had (it's not clear and you'll see why in a moment) been going out for some time.

For a long time Jimmy Kimmel has been doing a bit of celebrity baiting of Matt Damon, long time friend of Ben Affleck. If you're that guy who lives under a tree stump in Idaho who hasn't heard of these two, check the links. Kimmel's baiting of Matt Damon has been in the form of signing off his show apologising to Damon that they had run out of time and weren't going to be bringing him on. Damon was never scheduled. Kimmel even brought his cohort, Guillermo Rodriguez, the parking lot security guard for his show to tug Damon's chain. The video for that is here. Finally, Damon was invited to the show only to be blown off as soon as he sat down. See here. Damon was apparently upset but with celebrities one can never tell.

Then, on January 31, 2008, Silverman appeared on Kimmel's show and showed a breakup video. That video is here. I won't say anything about it except it is very funny. Whether or not it represents an actual breakup is, as always with these things, unclear.

On February 24, 2008, Kimmel showed his revenge clip response to Silverman's video. That video is here.

Celebrity baiting is at its purest and most rarified form when the celebrities bait each other. As Lacombe said in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, they are events sociological.

What's incredibly fascinating to me is I was first turned on to this by the science blog, Gene Expression. Go figure.