/ 3 March 2011

Schadenfreude and Charlie Sheen

Actor Charlie Sheen's public meltdown has made international headlines. Better yet, it provided cannon fodder for the idle minds on the internet.

Actor Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown has made international headlines. Better yet, it provided cannon fodder for the idle minds on the internet.

Actor Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown has made international headlines. The Hollywood actor has been a well-known and unapologetic drug addict and user of prostitutes for years. Late last year, the star of the top-rated TV show Two and a Half Men went on a drug- and alcohol-fuelled binge with a group of prostitutes.

In January, at the request of TV studio executives, Sheen took a break from filming the TV show to enter rehabilitation at his home, which he dubbed “Sober Valley Lodge”. But after the actor slagged off the show’s creator Chuck Levine on a local radio station, the network announced that it was canceling the rest of the season. Over the next few days an unhinged Sheen appeared on talk shows and called in to radio stations, making wild statements about everything from drug addiction, to his sex life and acting career.

The mainstream media quickly picked up on Sheen’s mania. CNN weighed in on why we can’t stop watching the actor’s downward spiral, Salon.com tried to dissect his “porn family” and interview on Good Morning America is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The interview yielded such quotable quotes as “You borrow my brain for five seconds and just be like dude, can’t handle it, unplug this bastard. It fires in a way that is, I don’t know, maybe not from this terrestrial realm,” and “I’m on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available. If you try it once, you will die.”

Even without the disturbing visuals of a twitchy, manic Sheen, a simple list of his recent statements are enough to raise both eyebrows.
It took about a day for the internet to explode with Charlie Sheenisms. The mirth wasn’t just left to late night talk show hosts and people who caption Lolcats; even serious publications like the Guardian got in on the action. To save you the trouble of trawling through Google, the M&G Online has rounded five fun Charlie Sheen internet memes.

The Charlie Sheen Twitter account
On Wednesday, Charlie Sheen set up an authenticated Twitter account, in which he describes himself as an “unemployed winner”. In just over 24 hours he’d already amassed over a million followers, including the Time Magazine News Feed, writer-producer Jane Espenson of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame and Business Day editor Peter Bruce. This set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest time to reach a million followers on Twitter. His 21 tweets over the past three days include such classic Sheenisms as “Face it folks, you just feel better when you say it. #WINNING.”

Charlie Sheen vs Muammar Gaddafi
In a quiz called Who’s line is it anyway? the Guardian challenged readers to differentiate between quotes from Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi and those from the unstable Hollywood actor. We dare you to score higher than an eight on this tricky quiz.

The Charlie Sheen glossary
New York Magazine published a Charlie Sheen glossary, which includes alternate definitions for “Charlie Sheen”. According to the glossary, this could be defined as either “the actor whose erratic behaviour may have cost him his lucrative job as a sitcom lead” or “the perfectly legal, yet dangerous substance that said actor claims to use recreationally”.

Sheen quotes as New Yorker cartoons
A poster on BuzzFeed used Charlie Sheen quotes to repurpose Darth Vader, or Gnarles Barkley or a faceoff with chronic ranters Mel Gibson and Christian Bale, they’re all in the mix. But for subtle humour, this clip from late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! in which Sheen’s Good Morning America interview is set to clips from a classic Charlie Brown cartoon, gets full marks.