The dumbest question ever asked of a celebrity is also, for some dumb reason, the most celebrated.
“What were you thinking?” Jay Leno asked Hugh Grant when he appeared on the Tonight Show following his 1995 bust for a publicly lewd act with a prostitute. Leno was probably the only man in America who didn’t know what Grant was thinking when it occurred to him that not only did he want a blow job at that specific moment, but that he had the money on hand to pay for one.
And now Tiger Woods is asked, by way of his long dead father, “Did you learn anything?”–which along with the rest of Tiger’s ghastly, ghostly new Nike commercial, is right up there in stupidity.
The question is prefaced by Old Man Woods, speaking offscreen in the austere tone of a psychologist, stating the objectives of his inquiry, most significantly, “I want to find out what your thinking was….”
Again, obvious. The well-media coached Boy Tiger said it himself, in his mid-February speech: “I thought only about myself…I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled.”
And what do I think?
The commercial shows that Woods and Nike will stop at nothing, exploiting the dead to prolong the commercial life of a terminally discredited brand. And note how Tiger never changes his blank, cadaverous expression, offering no answer, not even a facial tick of response to the billion-dollar endorsement question, Did you learn anything?
“I think you know in life what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bad thing, and I did a bad thing. And there you have it,” was the way Grant answered Len–and it was a dumb answer to a dumb question.
But at least he said something.