It’s a banner day for celebrities saying things they regret: First Tracy Morgan is apologizing for his recent anti-gay routine, and now Russell Crowe has issued a statement addressing some recent remarks he made on Twitter that provided “fodder for lazy journalists” when they interpreted it as a dig at the Jews. And since no journalist is lazier than me, here’s one of those offending tweets. Mmmm fodder, nom nom nom.
As you can see, Crowe roped in his Jewish pal Eli Roth, who's currently wearing the funny little writer and producer hats on the RZA-directed, Crowe-starring kung fu movie The Man With Iron Fists. Roth soon joked back, “You didn’t seem to be complaining when I was recutting you this afternoon…," which is a decent comeback. Obviously, Roth took Crowe’s comments in good humor, and so he was the first to rush to Crowe’s defense when sites like The Huffington Post and The Hollywood Reporter ran with the story without “doing any fact-checking,” thereby “poisoning a very good person’s name,” and making it so “no one takes newspapers seriously anymore.” (The murder of the print industry, solved!)
Of course, as Movieline—who archived both Crowe and Roth’s entire tirades here—points out, there’s probably not a whole lot of “fact-checking” to be done as to whether Crowe was just joking when he said, “Circumcision is barbaric and stupid. Who are you to correct nature? Is it real that GOD requires a donation of foreskin? Babies are perfect.” Because that's obviously hilarious. Though if Crowe was just joking, he certainly spent a lot of time defending his point of view pretty seriously—including telling one follower, “'Human’ science has caused too much damage, don’t be a moron,” countering another's claim that it was "hygienic" with, "Hygenic? [sic] Why don't you sew up your ass then?" (which we will admit is pretty funny), and declaring, "Last of it, if u feel it is yr right 2 cut things off yr babies please unfollow and fuck off, I'll take attentive parenting over barbarism."
And of course, he was also serious about his apology, removing all of the related tweets and then issuing the following: “I have a deep and abiding love for all people of all nationalities, I'm very sorry that I have said things on here that have caused distress,” he said, adding, “My personal beliefs aside I realize that some will interpret this debate as me mocking the rituals and traditions of others. I am very sorry.” Anyway, Roth seems to believe that this whole mild controversy is “terrifying stars into not saying any jokes on Twitter,” which hopefully isn’t true, because we lazy journalists need things to talk about.