4 Respected Celebrities Who Are Slowly Losing Their Minds

4

Will Smith Invented His Own Math-Based Religion

In a recent interview with Vulture, Will Smith and his son, Jaden, sat down to talk about After Earth, which would go on to earn worldwide acclaim as the shittiest piece of shit ever released in either of their careers. Right out of the gate, Will calls himself a physicist, and then he begins babbling about some universal space math he invented that has absolutely nothing to do with physics:

Sean Gallup / Getty

Will: I'm a student of patterns. At heart, I'm a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything.

He proceeds to give two examples of irrefutable patterns in the universe -- the sun rising and setting every day (which is a result of the Earth's orbit, and is every bit as much a "pattern" as the distance between your house and the bus stop remaining the same every time you walk it), and the way people win Academy Awards. Incidentally, Will Smith stumps himself on that second pattern as he is describing it:

Will: The patterns are all over the place, but for whatever reason, it's really difficult to find the patterns in Best Actress.

Sean Gallup / Getty
When you're a celebrity, words mean whatever you want them to mean.

Luckily, he passed his pattern-spotting power on to Jaden. Otherwise, not another living soul in this world would have any idea what the hell he was talking about:

Jaden: I think that there is that special equation for everything, but I don't think our mathematics have evolved enough for us to even- I think there's, like, a whole new mathematics that we'd have to learn to get that equation.

Will: I agree with that.

Jaden: It's beyond mathematical. It's, like, multidimensional mathematical, if you can sort of understand what I'm saying.

Ray Tamarra / Getty
"Never take mathematics advice from someone wearing a white suit." -Steven Hawking

3

Tom Hanks Has a Weird Obsession With Lost Gloves

Tom Hanks has picked up a hobby that's somewhere between taxidermy and keeping jars full of smells on a shelf in his basement -- he wanders around taking pictures of single lost gloves he finds in the street.

WhoSay
Not at all like a crazy person.

Those are from Hanks' WhoSay account, although they seem to be taken from the scrapbook of a quiet old widow who is slowly poisoning her neighbor's cat to death. As he very passionately explained to CBS This Morning: "It's freezing cold outside, and it's no fun to have a bare hand when it's freezing cold. And yet, someone has lost a glove. That means half their life has disappeared for the course of the day. Sometimes they're pretty little knitted gloves, sometimes they're hard working ... What is a better metaphor for the loneliness of the city? Of a single lost glove?"

We think a better metaphor for loneliness is a middle-aged man collecting photographs of gloves.

D Dupasipil / FilmMagic / Getty
We can't think of a caption funnier than that mustache.

2

Michael Douglas Doesn't Understand How Cancer Works

In what was no doubt the most revealing interview ever to be conducted by the Guardian, Michael Douglas attributed his throat cancer not to the years of smoking and drinking that almost certainly caused it, but to a type of HPV he got from performing oral sex on women. Certain types of HPV have been linked to oral cancer, true, but Douglas went on to claim that the same tainted oral sex actually cured his throat cancer, which at best represents a tenuous grasp of medical science and at worst is something an aggressively sexist douchebag would say to avoid taking responsibility for his life choices.

Stuart C. Wilson / Stringer / Getty
"Vaginas are treacherous, but they have magical restorative powers if you respect them."

Douglas' publicist initially denied the remarks, but the Guardian went ahead and released the audio tape of the interview, in which you can clearly hear the actor unleashing his pseudo-scientific lunacy. This is a circuitous way of saying that, one way or another, Catherine Zeta-Jones has herpes.

1

Paula Deen Wanted to Have Tap-Dancing Slaves at Her Brother's Wedding

You've no doubt seen TV chef Paula Deen trending everywhere the last few days, and you may know that it involves racism somehow. But where most controversies like this involve assholes losing their temper and/or being extremely intoxicated (see: Michael Richards, Mel Gibson), Deen is apparently one of the most bizarrely and archaicly racist people alive today. We're not even sure that we should call what she has "racism" -- it almost feels like some other, weird level.

Alexander Tamargo / Getty
If Jefferson Davis and Colonel Sanders could have had a daughter ...

She and her brother are being sued by a former employee for making several racist comments, in addition to various instances of sexual harassment and borderline physical assault (those last two complaints are entirely aimed at Deen's brother). For example, in 2007, Deen allegedly described her catering plans for her brother's wedding as follows:

"Well what I would really like is a bunch of little n_____s to wear long-sleeve white shirts, black shorts, and black bow ties, you know in the Shirley Temple days, they used to tap dance around ... Now that would be a true Southern wedding, wouldn't it? But we can't do that because the media would be on me about that."

Pictured: The inside of Paula Deen's mind.

In a recent deposition, Deen did admit to putting on what was referred to as a "Southern plantation wedding," claiming that her inspiration came from a visit to a Southern restaurant where all the waiters were middle-aged black men wearing white jackets and bow ties. In her words, she said she would "love to have servers like that" but was afraid that "somebody would misinterpret" it and mistake her for some crazy old woman recreating slavery for her own amusement.

She seemed to legitimately have no idea why anyone could see that as offensive -- and it's her wide-eyed confusion about the whole thing that makes it so much weirder. Mainly because it suggests that there are so many other people still out there who share the same view that she has never met anyone outside the group. That ... that can't be true, can it?