Jennifer O’Connell: James Corden’s omelette eruption explanation has a touch of the Will Smiths

Spare a thought for middle-aged male celebrities, a demographic for whom fame has become a much higher-risk activity in recent years. In the 1990s you could marry your own stepdaughter and explain it away with a breezy “the heart wants what it wants”. Nowadays all it takes is getting grumpy at someone getting your egg order wrong, and the result is potential total career annihilation.

We are, of course, talking about the “tiny cretin” and public enemy of egg white James Corden.

A week is several lifetimes in the trajectory of celebrity spat and subsequent rehabilitation, and in that time the TV host has seen the light — and also, perhaps, a crisis-management PR team

The British TV host, whom the New York Times describes as aggressively affable and the Guardian says is a charming presence in an unappetising field, has once again been forced to address an incident that saw him barred from a New York restaurant a week on from the last time he addressed the incident.

[ ‘Abusive cretin’ James Corden on his restaurant ban: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong, on any level’ ]

A week is several lifetimes in the trajectory of celebrity spat and subsequent rehabilitation, and in that time Corden has seen the light — and, perhaps, a crisis-management PR team.

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The incident kicked off when Keith McNally, the London-born owner of Manhattan’s Balthazar restaurant — did he mention he’s working on his memoir? — published an online tirade, in which he accused Corden of being “abusive” and “yelling like crazy” at restaurant staff on two separate occasions. “James Corden is a Hugely gifted comedian, but a tiny Cretin of a man. And the most abusive customer to my Balthazar servers since the restaurant opened 25 years ago. I don’t often 86 a customer, [but] today I 86′d Corden. It did not make me laugh,” he wrote on October 18th. (To 86 someone is an American term for barring them, and dates back to the days of soda fountains.)

McNally went on to include details from two managers’ reports in which Corden was described as being “extremely nasty” after he found a hair in his food and guilty of “yelling like crazy” after the kitchen got his wife’s omelette order wrong.

Two days later Corden gave an interview to Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times in which he decided not to run with the fake apology these situations typically require. “My feeling often is never explain, never complain. But I’ll probably have to talk about it,” he said, going on to talk about it. “I haven’t done anything wrong on any level. So why would I ever cancel this [interview]? I was there. I get it. I feel so Zen about the whole thing,” he added, sounding not all that Zen. “Because I think it’s so silly. I just think it’s beneath all of us. It’s beneath you. It’s certainly beneath your publication.”

This kind of thing “happens every day. It’s happening in 55,000 restaurants as we speak. It’s always,” he added philosophically, “about eggs.”

The most unedifying thing about this situation is, I think, that Corden dragged his wife into his spat, using her allergy as an excuse for his rudeness. There is an unfortunate touch of the Will Smiths about this

That was then, this is now. If Boris Johnson took a whole three months to come to terms with his mistakes, grow as a person, and reconsider his future and what he might offer his country, Corden seems to have decided that four days was a reasonable period of rehabilitation. On Monday night’s episode of The Late Late Show, his US chatshow, he managed to both concede and categorically deny any wrongdoing.

He said that he has been “walking around thinking that I haven’t done anything wrong” because “I didn’t shout or scream, I didn’t get up out of my seat, I didn’t call anyone names or use derogatory language”. He was reacting to the fact that his wife, Julia Carey, was given “food which she was allergic to” and that her order had “come wrong to the table” three times. He now sees that he was “rude, rude ... It was an unnecessary comment, it was ungracious.”

You might think that, on a scale of, say, zero to John Cleese, publicly calling someone “a tiny cretin of a man” is at least on a par with snarling at a server, but the rules of pile-ons dictate that the more famous an individual, the more unblemished their record of civil behaviour must be.

The most unedifying thing about this situation, however, isn’t how little it takes to get cancelled, or that Corden apparently snarled or yelled at a server. Nor is it how the restaurateur seems shamelessly to have capitalised on it, racking up global headlines, before promptly unbanning him two days later in another Instagram post signed off with a flurry of kisses. It is, I think, that Corden dragged his wife into his spat, using her allergy as an excuse for his rudeness.

There is an unfortunate touch of the Will Smiths about this.

What is with angry men blaming their wives for their inability to be civil? And why are we so ready to believe that behind every man throwing a tantrum is a poor, vulnerable woman in need of protection?

When Smith strode on stage and slapped Chris Rock in March, spawning an instant pandemic of hot takes, he roared: “Keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth” and later mumbled something about being a “vessel of love”. The next day, on Instagram, he said that “a joke about Jada’s medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally.” Corden similarly relied on the defending-my-wife defence — in this case from the risk of contamination with a trace of egg white. “He was sticking up for his wife” is never an excuse for bad behaviour, and it’s often a sign of something much more problematic.

What is with angry men blaming their wives for their inability to be civil? And why are the media so accepting of it as an excuse? Why are we so ready to believe that behind every man throwing a tantrum is a poor, vulnerable woman in need of protection?

Jada Pinkett Smith, Will’s wife, is more than capable of standing up for herself in the face of an insensitive joke, just as Julia Carey is presumably well able to send back her own omelette. The notion that women need their husbands or partners to throw around insults and slaps as a sign of their devotion is rooted in a place where deep ego meets a troublingly archaic vision of masculinity. It’s the same mentality that infers women are responsible for policing male behaviour, or that lets men off the hook by suggesting they are mere helpless conduits of their baser impulses.

Julia Carey may be a TV producer, mother of three children and assiduous keeper of a low profile. But she can forget that now she’s destined to be known as the woman who doesn’t like egg white in her omelette

In both cases the result is that these women have been relegated to bit-part players in their husband or partner’s drama. Pinkett Smith will never again do an interview in which her alopecia — or the slap — does not merit at least a paragraph. Carey may be a TV producer, mother of three children and assiduous keeper of a low profile. But she can forget that now she’s destined to be known as the woman who doesn’t like egg white in her omelette.

Smith eventually apologised to Rock in a rambling Instagram post in July and made it clear that “Jada had nothing to do with it. I’m sorry, babe.”

Corden has made up with McNally and says he’ll apologise in person when he’s back in New York. But he owes his wife an apology too for dragging her into the fallout from his embarrassing, ego-fuelled tantrum.