Celebrities, take note: This is how you handle intrusions into your personal life.
Reporters at the Television Critics Association winter press tour tried gamely to ask Russell Brand on Sunday about his New Year's Eve divorce filing from Katy Perry. He went the intensely intellectual route, first euphemistically referring to the breakup as "events" and referencing Kurt Vonnegut.
"Well I suppose what you're doing is you're making the mistake of seeing time as linear," he told one questioner. "The brilliant American author Kurt Vonnegut, he'll tell ya that if you imagine reality as experienced simultaneously, events become redundant."
Moments later, the British comedian delivered the best "no comment" in the history of celebrity breakups.
"I don't want to further celebrate the overly elaborate, brittle plastic structures of nonsense that are constantly fired into our minds to distract us from what's really important," he said. "So if I'd done something actually newsworthy... then I'd cover it. But if it was just more laquered nonsense, designed to distract us from truth, then I would wisely ignore it."
That's what J. Lo and Marc Anthony should have said during an awkward joint appearance Saturday.
Brand kept reporters rolling with laughter during a panel for his upcoming FX series, "Strangely Uplifting," where he was also asked for his take on the Republican presidential candidates. He said of Mitt Romney: "He's so rich that even the one percent would seem to him like peasants."
He also commented on the shock over Marines urinating on Taliban corpses: "It is bad to wee on a dead body. But it's worse to kill a live one."
