Brad Pitt's Prankster Isn't Funny, He's Terrifying
Last night at the Los Angeles premiere of Maleficent, Brad Pitt got ambushed by Vitalii Sediuk, the Ukranian “red carpet prankster” who either punched or touched Pitt’s face, depending on the source. Either way, it was enough for him to be tackled by security and arrested on suspicion of battery and held on $20,000 bail. Being dragged from a red carpet event is nothing new for Sediuk, who crawled under America Ferrera’s dress earlier this month at Cannes, buried his head in Bradley Cooper’s crotch at the SAG Awards, and elicited a slap from Will Smith when he tried to kiss him at 2012’s Men in Black 3 premiere. His shtick is to try and throw celebrities off their game by doing something completely unexpected and inappropriate. That’s not a new idea, and not necessarily a bad idea, but there’s a problem: His pranks aren’t funny. They’re kind of terrifying.
Red carpet events could use some humor and spontaneity. Their default mode involves a string of journalists asking similar questions, and the stars struggling to think of variations to the same answers. This can make you grateful for anybody who shakes things up even a little, whether it’s Elisabeth Moss flipping off the E! News “mani-cam” or Buzzfeed asking Kevin Spacey the default “female celebrity” questions (“Do you have any Spanx on tonight?”). Yes, sometimes the results are less funny than others, but at least the reactions are less rehearsed.
The red carpet status quo was memorably upset in the ‘90s when Howard Stern dispatched sidekick “Stuttering John” Melendez to press conferences in order to ask celebrities the most insulting questions possible. Sometimes, the stars would laugh and throw it back at him; sometimes, they’d punch him in the face. This spawned a wave of imitators, with Morning Zoo DJs all over the country sending emissaries to goad stars with dumb questions. The long tail of this can be seen today, like when the willfully discombobulated UK intern who got Mila Kunis to eagerly talk about drinking and soccer at the Oz: The Great and Powerful junket.
However, there is a limit to the kind of shenanigans that will be permitted. At press junkets, for example, the studios hosting them control the footage so if a reporter was rude, the interview would never be seen. And red carpets are usually sacred: Kathy Griffin was fired from E! News in 2005 for making jokes about 11-year-old Dakota Fanning entering rehab — a practically G-rated version of Stuttering John’s shtick. Sacha Baron Cohen dropping “Kim Jong Il’s ashes” on Ryan Seacrest at the 2012 Oscars was a gasp-inducing moment for this reason; Cohen got away with it, barely, because the butt of the joke was an interviewer and not an unsuspecting actor.
Sediuk may be motivated by a desire to puncture the programmed nature of red carpets — but what he’s doing is not helping. It can be funny to throw stars off their game, especially if they embrace it. What’s not funny is if you terrify them. Look at it from, say, America Ferrera’s point of view: You’re on the red carpet promoting How to Train Your Dragon 2. All you can see in front of you are camera flashes, which was enough to set King Kong off. Beyond the paparazzi, there are hundreds of clamoring fans, held off by little more than a police barrier. Fans are screaming at you, photographers are shouting at you to turn to the left, publicist and event coordinators are literally pushing you in the right direction — and suddenly, you realize that some strange guy has crawled under your legs, an act that would be violating even if it wasn’t a spectator sport. Ha… ha?
“Jokes” like these aren’t helping celebrities loosen up and take themselves less seriously. Sediuk is approaching the stars in situations where they’re already nervous and on high alert, and doing something that is genuinely startling. If anything, he’s making the celebrities less likely to go off-script. If a star lets his guard down, how does he know that some rogue Eastern European reporter won’t cross the police barrier and try to deck him?
The worst part is that there’s no real point to what Sediuk does. A great prankster is aiming for a bigger punchline. On Da Ali G Show, Sacha Baron Cohen compelled celebrities to speak candidly by feigning complete ignorance of who they were. With Punk’d, Ashton Kutcher showed us how stars really act when they don’t think they’re being watched. Vitalii Sediuk has clearly demonstrated that when you annoy a famous person, they react by being annoyed. That doesn’t make him a subversive comedian; it just makes him a jackass.
Photo: Giana Mucci
