The “I wanna be famous!” craze has been around forever and we all recognize it. Sure, sure, everybody wants to be beautiful and well liked, but let’s face it, there’s something extra going on with the fascination with fame these days. Call it our present day natural selection or status evaluation or some anthropological whatever, the fact is, there’s a special, tantalizing Ba Zing! about this dementia praecox known as “celebrity worship.”
You might say it’s even a religious kind of thing. In a 2009 U.S. News article, Dr. John Lucas, a clinical assistant professor of psychology at Weill Cornell Medical College, made that connection. “What we know of them through People magazine and other media sources fills a gaping and painful void in our lives,” Lucas said. “The dwindling influence of religion adds to that sense of yearning in people, making the stars’ exploits and eccentricities, their loves and losses, more than a form of entertainment.” Lucas is saying, essentially, that the word worship in “celebrity worship” can be more than just hyperbole.
In that light, there’s a sense that these movie stars and TV personalities dwell in a unique universe from ours. It’s something we live with and gaze at in our everyday lives, yet it’s also an existence light years beyond our reach. And that’s why so many among us ache for a chance to join that number.
We’ll buy from the star’s lines of jeans and colognes. We study celebrity movements and mannerisms. We’ll volunteer for the latest “Naked People Doing Stupid Stuff” reality TV show. We’ll spend outrageous amounts on fashions and plastic surgery to look just a bit more like a Kardashian, all in the hopes that maybe, someday, we’ll be recognized by Esquire magazine to be the sexiest “somebody” on earth.
But there’s an interesting twist that’s been happening lately. In a Washington Post blog titled “Why are celebrities playing silly games on TV?”, writer Emily Yahr suggests that—much like girls—celebs just wanna have fun. She sites all the late night and prime-time ways that celebrities are foregoing the oh-so-cool-and-aloof interview chair for a whole bunch of goofy on-air games. Joining in with hosts such as Jimmy Fallon and Craig Ferguson, groups of stars are getting hit with pies and goofing around with silly games of Charades and Pictionary. Essentially they’re stepping off their pedestals and … being like us.
“The guests like it because the pressure to remain grand and aloof—and also the pressure to somehow appear sparkling or inspire a conversation—is off,” Craig Ferguson is quoted as saying. “All you have to do is play the game, so the guesswork is out of it. So I think for both sides of the equation, that’s the attraction.”
[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlqMnDUtfOQ:550:0]
At least some of these famous folks, then, would rather be seen as regular Joes (with gazillion dollar paychecks) than be held aloft and oohed and ahhed over. And that makes sense when you consider how Internet sites like Twitter and Tumblr (and what-have-you) have made obsession with the famous, well, kind of creepy. Or maybe I should just say … even creepier.
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