Humorouz

Ricky Gervais has appeared to respond to Will Smith hitting Chris Rock in the face during the 2022 Oscars.

During Sunday (27 March) night’s ceremony, Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, while he was presenting an award.

“Jada, I love you. GI Jane 2, can’t wait to see you,” Rock said, seemingly in reference to Pinkett Smith’s shaved head.

Last year, Pinkett Smith announced she had shaved her head after being diagnosed with alopecia.

On Monday (28 March), Gervais retweeted a video shared by the official David Brent account.

The clip, taken from an episode of The Office, showed his character saying: “Particularly for his wife. And she’s got alopecia. So… not a happy homelife.”

The clip has since been retweeted more than 3,000 times.

Gervais famously hosted the Golden Globes five times, during which he became known for roasting celebrities to their faces.

As the action at the Oscars unfolded on screen, Gervais answered a series of tweets from fans about how he would have opened the show, had he been presenting.

“I’d start with ‘Hello. I hope this show helps cheer up the ordinary people watching at home. If you’re unemployed for example, take some comfort in the fact that even if you had a job, your salary probably wouldn’t be as much as the goody bag all the actors have just been given,’” he tweeted.

“‘I’m proud to announce that this is the most diverse and progressive Oscars ever. Looking out I see people from all walks of life. Every demographic under the sun. Except poor people, obviously. F*** them.’”

Asked what he would finish with, the comedian replied: “My career.”

Find the full list of 2022 Oscar winners here. See the latest updates and reactions from the dramatic ceremony here, and read about the biggest talking points here.

At the end of the second season M*A*S*H episode “Radar’s Report,” Gary Burghoff paints a smile on Radar O’Reilly’s face as only he can do.

Six years earlier, Burghoff had perfected the art of the small hopeful smile while playing one of the most wholesome characters on Broadway: Charlie Brown.

“Gary Burghoff, who plays Charlie, has that perfect knack of starting a tiny, hopeful little smile only to have it fade into self-dismay after some nasty crack from Lucy,” reported The Janesville Daily Gazette in 1967.

That year, many theater critics declared Burghoff a “good man” for gripping audiences with such good-natured material as Peanuts.

Burghoff’s version of Charlie Brown smashed Hollywood stage records, selling out every show and shocking everyone by selling $87,000 in advance ticket sales.

Nobody could’ve predicted the success, but winning life with a small smile has remained Burghoff’s style.

Burghoff is one of those enigmas, someone who seems to be talented at everything he tries. There’s seemingly nothing this multifaceted man cannot do.

Before Broadway, he was touring all the major nightclubs as the drummer holding down a celebrated jazz trio. After Broadway, he portrayed Radar in both the movie MASH and then the TV show M*A*S*H, leading Burghoff to soon win an Emmy for his talent as an actor.

Although it was a huge shock when Burghoff left M*A*S*H in its eighth season, Burghoff had discovered that he no longer wished to continue doing anything that wasn’t what he truly wished to be doing. And he felt he’d done all he could with Radar’s character.

He decided to leave behind his famous character, mostly because he truly felt that by putting off the other things he wanted to do beyond Radar, he was literally putting off living his own life.

So, he left M*A*S*H, and he went home to live near his family in Connecticut, where he took up painting.

In this craft, he excelled again, selling paintings of animals in each state that had come back from being endangered. The paintings would sell for as much as $25,000, and when he made limited edition prints, those would fetch anywhere from $200 to $800 a pop.

During this time, Burghoff also raised his kids and made more music, composing more than 100 songs and winning recording industry awards for three of his best tunes.

As a painter, he caught just as many eyes for his work, and he told The Palladium Item in 1999 that his goal in painting wildlife was to show the world that setbacks were temporary and comebacks were real.

“I am hoping to make the statement we can overcome,” Burghoff said.

Burghoff could surely relate to this, as an actor who used to dream of winning an Academy Award, but who later decided his family life was more important to him than celebrity or critical acclaim.

Dreams change, and Burghoff knew it just took adjusting to follow the heart’s new desire to ensure he continued living his life to the fullest.

But that didn’t mean Burghoff was done with acting for good.

“When I turned 50, the phone stopped ringing,” Burghoff told The Leader-Telegram in 2003. “How do you cast a 50-year-old Radar? Now slowly they’re beginning to say, ‘Gary Burghoff has surpassed Radar. We know that he has a range. Let’s cast him in character roles.'”

Burghoff continued acting through the mid-1990s, with one final appearance in a 2010 movie where he played a local pastor who inspires a man who is down on his luck.

It’s a fitting final role for Burghoff if it ends up being his last, because the man was seemingly made of inspiration and refused to let luck factor into his life — pushing himself to become a talented painter, musician, and actor, as well as a devoted family man.

He seemingly was too busy living life to the fullest to ever view one thing ending as anything but something else beginning.

In 1968, Burghoff imparted to The Los Angeles Citizen News a bit of wisdom that shows from the start of his acting career, he had already decided to make the best of whatever might come, practically embodying the small hopeful smile he charmed us with so often onstage and onscreen.

“We can’t all get a Valentine every day, but we learn to accept it as we learn to accept all phases of life — the good and the bad,” Burghoff said. “Happiness is two kinds of ice cream.”

Weeknights at 6 PM

April Fool everyone, it’s actually 2015, the coalition is still in Government and none of this terrible shit actually happened, it was all just an elaborate prank.

A debilitating week for Treasury-based luxury casualwear influencer Rishi Sunak. He used to seem invincible; now he’s the pocket Samson who’s just taken a massive haircut courtesy of his wife. I know Rishi wants to be prime minister and stuff, but it’s increasingly difficult to imagine how the mega-rich chancellor would persuade ordinary British people to do difficult things. Mate – you can’t even persuade your own wife to pay you tax.

But before I get accused of being a sexist by … hang on, let me get my lorgnette … James Cleverly, we’d better have a recap of developing events, which now include a US green card controversy. Initially believed to be watching his political oxidisation on Pacific time, the chancellor is in fact on these shores. I hear Lynton Crosby has banned Easter getaways, meaning Sunak will have to unwind in one of his houses in this country, as opposed to the high-end Santa Monica apartment he owns in a complex that includes a pet spa.

Anyway, he has granted a hotly defensive exclusive interview to the Sun, which runs under the apoplectic banner LAY OFF MY MISSUS. And I think you’ll agree that headline truly captures the way Rishi Sunak speaks. This, quite simply, is a guy who is as at-home screaming a warning out of a van window as he is indulging in a desultory browse of Mr Porter’s fine knits, his cursor hovering briefly over a £495 smoke-blue James Perse cashmere hoodie before the window is closed in listless pique. There are some injustices even a knitwear purchase can’t alleviate. Even so, I think the headline could have been punchier. I’d have gone with PAY TAX? IN THIS ECONOMY?!

As for the meat of the interview, I hugely enjoyed the implication that the £30,000 annual flat fee required for Akshata Murty to retain her non-dom status is the typical foreign national experience in this country. As Rishi explains of Murty’s completely legal arrangements: “That is how the system works for people like her who are international who have moved here.” (Great to hear that at least one part of any of the UK system works. “The system works” is really not a phrase you’re hearing a lot right now.) Very enjoyable, too, to read the furious commentary about Murty on MailOnline and in the Daily Mail, whose proprietor Lord Rothermere inherited his own non-dom status from his father. Again: the system works.

And listen, what’s not to love about this latest episode of Sunak’s fish-out-of-water comedy? Recent outings have seen the rarefied protagonist’s hilarious interactions with the ordinary world. The one where he goes to the petrol station and fills up someone else’s car, then tries to scan his card on the barcode reader. The one where he fails to do anything meaningful in his mini-budget to alleviate the cost of living crisis for the poorest households, then promptly gives an interview in which he trills: “We all have different breads in my house.” The one where he scans the popular press and comes up with the perfect person to self-pityingly compare himself to in a manner that in no way caused his spads to kick a hole in the wall. As Sunak explained: “Both Will Smith and me, having our wives attacked …” Come on! It’s a funny show!

Moving on to the villain trying to sabotage him, their precise identity remains a mystery. Where are all the mean stories about Sunak coming from? Not quite sure we need to activate Nancy Drew on this puzzle – Sunak’s naked manoeuvring, coupled with his vanishing act every time an unfavourable partygate story broke for Boris Johnson, suggests at least the dim possibility that his aggressor may be known to him. My own fan theory, however, is that this is a show where Sunak plays both protagonist and antagonist. Or to put it another way, he is his own worst enemy.

The current stories are not a “smear”, as he claims, but the totally predictable consequence of his family’s financial arrangements, which he should have seen coming a mile off. It may be perfectly legal, but it is obviously – obviously! – a giant piss-take if the chancellor’s own wife has non-dom status.

Apologies for returning to an achingly familiar furrow for this column over the years, but it really doesn’t have to be this way. The Hong Kong tax code, often cited as the most efficient and avoidance-proof in the world, is around 350 pages. The ever-expanding UK tax code is the world’s longest, currently running to more than 22,000 pages, having increased vastly in size under both Labour and Conservative governments. Unsurprisingly, it amounts to a charter for myriad types of avoidance. Tell you who should do something about this, just like all his recent predecessors should have but didn’t: Rishi Sunak.

Instead, he prefers to spend his days saying no to pleas to alleviate hardship, which seems to exist in a universe beyond his comprehension. Hard to pick a low point, but I’ll go with the time he turned down the request from the hugely respected educational recovery tsar Kevan Collins for £15bn in pandemic catch-up funding for children. Sunak would only fork out £1.4bn, which isn’t even twice what he spent buying people free burgers with “eat out to help out”. Collins resigned in despair. It emerged that an internal presentation had shown Sunak and others in Downing Street how failure to invest £15bn now in this failed generation of children would result in the state paying upwards of £160bn down the line in welfare and criminal justice. And still Sunak said no, presumably on the basis that that would all be someone else’s problem in the future. As David Cameron reportedly said to his aides before his post-referendum resignation: “Why should I do all the hard shit?”

And why should Rishi Sunak do it either? Why shouldn’t his wife tick the box and keep paying her 30 grand a year to stay out of things? Why shouldn’t statements of fact be denounced as smears? All sorts of things are optional if ordinary people would only realise it. Let them eat different breads.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist