Saggy Bottom Blues?

      As RK and I have been discussing (among other things) the fitness of Brad Pitt to play Achilles in Troy last year (?), it's appropriate that I stumbled on this oldish interview with the wonderfully witty Stephen Fry at The Onion. This bit caught me chuckling:

It's a great thing to be a free, jobbing actor. Because we're still perfectly well paid, God knows, and we have a great time. And so in that sense, I'm probably lucky not to look like Brad Pitt or whoever. Because at least if you look like me, as each year passes, it's not going to be a disaster. Whereas one day, Brad Pitt's bottom is going to sag a bit. And there'll be a queue of people going "Ha, ha, ha!" So if you start off with a saggy bottom, it doesn't matter. [Laughs.]

And then there's this, which sounds as much like it describes the Not-So-Good Doctor as it does Mr. Fry:

I'm much more of an entertainer. I like to engage and to provoke. I certainly don't want to be formulaic. I want to be honest and authentic and everything else. I never quite dare to believe I'm brave enough to be an artist, but I'm on the side of artists. I think of myself as a bit of a Salieri, looking with longing eyes at Mozart.

I'd dare to add in my own case that I don't seem to have the ambition or the imagination that artists need to have, and the discipline has certainly faded some with age. But back to Mr. Fry: the interview is really quite good, as I'd hope you'd expect from Mr. Fry. Check out, too, this excerpt from Fry's novel The Liar that appeared on this blog some time ago. Fry, at his best, is one of the funniest people in the world, in this blog's not-too-humble estimation, a fact used to try to introduce (er, appropriately, I guess) through the backdoor when I used to use an episode of the UK Whose Line Is It Anyway? (in which he appeared alongside Josie Lawrence, Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie, truly the Brits versus the North Americans) to introduce aspects and dimensions of comedy. That class worked every time. You see? Being a bit of a saggy-bottom Salieri isn't always so bad after all.

      (Okay, I don't have a saggy bottom: but that would insist on me having a bottom in the first place.)

      As for the rest of us, we can just wait for the day when Pitt the Bulger starts having to wear the sagging bottoms of his trousers rolled. Will he dare to eat a peach? And how will he reflect upon the pit?