What a difference a coast can make — Mariah Carey's spotty performance on Good Morning America was scrubbed clean when the show aired on the West Coast. The first clip of the video above shows her struggling with adlibbing when her performance aired live; the second clip is the sanitized way it aired three hours later. They also, of course, removed was her S-bomb. So basically, they took out much of what made her appearance fun.

I'll take illusion-shattering errors over boring canned perfection any day.

In my experience, the Hangover movies are mildly amusing when they aren't despicable. They are founded on a clever premise (retracing the steps of the blackout night before). They relish the joy and profound weirdness that stupidity can produce. They touch on relevant cultural practices and obsessions like eternal adolescence, bro culture, the mispronunciation of words and asshole-spotting.

The Hangover Part III is more despicable than amusing by a wide margin, though. This has a lot to do with Ken Jeong's amplified presence as Leslie Chow. That snake with the voice of a deflating, pinched balloon is all over this movie and perhaps the most inexplicably popular, aggressively insufferable character since Austin Powers' Fat Bastard. He is alternately moronic and cunning, both of which serve the film's Murphy's Law-fueled plot. He makes lame jokes (crawling on the floor to avoid triggering the security system of the house he just broke into, he sticks his nose in the ass of a fellow crawler and explains, "I’m saying hello. We’re dogs, remember?”) and lamer references (he sings "I Believe I Can Fly" as he parasails over Vegas). He is, clearly, a stew of stereotypes — he's described by another character as having "an Asian accent," which is dead on in its nonspecificity. Speaking of nonspecificity, Jeong has defended this character by explaining that the actor's awareness of the stereotypes he's conjuring make this character an example of "meta-humor." Perhaps it is in his head, but then that's just an inside joke – the movie profits off this character in traditional "Asian people are simultaneously stupid and threateningly crafty/unable to speak English/sexless/probably gay/small-penis-having" fashion.

We do inhabit, after all, a gently white supremacist universe when we drop by The Hangover. It is a place where there is a Black Doug and a regular Doug who needs no qualifier because he is white, duh. This a franchise that believes that anyone who isn't a straight white male is inherently funny (the penis of a person that audiences and characters were led to believe was a biological woman was the sight gag of the second film), and that variations of hilarity within straight white males come from where they sit on the dickhead scale. One of The Hangover's admirable qualities is its audacity, its bold going where most of its ilk will not. I'm not suggesting that you not laugh at whatever strikes you funny, even if you have to later lie to yourself using the word "meta." Enjoy these films. It's all jokes. Jokes help us cope, goes the conventional wisdom of routine offenders. Let's just know what we're laughing at.

Much of the humor that isn't based in degradation of immutable traits comes from Zach Galifianakis' Alan character, a savant of idiocy. He gets the best lines and delivers them better than this movie deserves. ("I can’t believe my daddy is dead. I can think of so many people I would have rather died first. Like my mother," is how he eulogizes his father early in the film.) Galifianakis' amazing feat in this franchise and in general is creating chemistry out of awkwardness – chemistry that, oozing from a lesser talent, would repel. He gets some funny scenes with a potential love interest played by Melissa McCarthy, whose fading Manic Panic purple hair is about the most dead-on observation of the film. He also gets to decapitate a giraffe he's transporting on a highway via a low clearance overpass. Get it because it's tall and the low clearance overpass isn't as tall?

Unlike the second film, which was more polemic than movie ("You were stupid enough to laugh at the first one; you're stupid enough to laugh at it all over again," is what it said), The Hangover Part III doesn't share the structure of the first. This is not a retracing of steps. In this one, the typically bachelor-partying group's association with Chow ropes them into tracking him down – their task as obligatory as the actors' in a squel to a billion-dollar franchise. And so, through a series of setbacks and miscalculations, the film glides along on the stupidity of its characters that it wants to punish and reward for having. Who cares anymore at this point? The tagline on the posters for The Hangover Part III is "The End." I'm not sure I believe that, as its final scene suggests otherwise. If it is, that tagline is the movie's best joke. God help us.

Don't get too excited — this is a mash-up of footage from a concert in which Celine Dion did her best Limber Louie impression to a cover of the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive," with the audio swapped out for "Get Lucky." But the synching is flawless. And those moves!

It's Memorial Day Friday. Hang loose. As loose as Celine Dion, if you can, even.

[via The Daily Edge]

Exhaustion works like heavy drugs on Mariah Carey, which is to say hashtag-beautifully, as anyone witness to her Glitter-era breakdown or Home Shopping Network rambling knows. She performed today in Central Park for Good Morning America's concert series, and the gig forced her to wake up early. "I wake up at this hour," she explained. "I don't mean I wake up, I mean I go to sleep. It's kinda the same thing for me." Indeed. Me too in that this morning I sprang out of bed, turned on my TV and felt like I was dreaming.

She also said "shit" and recovered terribly, immediately acknowledging it and explaining that she said "shoot," like we're stupid or #dembabies or something. Her dress popped open in the back and she turned it into a bit. No nipples were revealed. Only a self-consciously demure goofball like Mariah Carey would drop an S-bomb instead of an F- one and have a malfunction of a wardrobe malfunction. Even her fuck-ups are classy or, you know, hilarious caricatures of class, dahhhlings. Highlights of her weirdness are above.

Noted comedy misogynist/part-time cross-dresser Jerry Lewis reiterated his distaste for women comedians at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival today. Here is the AP's recap:

Asked who his favorite female comics were Thursday at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, Jerry Lewis listed Cary Grant and Burt Reynolds. He then added: "I don't have any."

In 1998, Lewis famously said that watching women do comedy "sets me back a bit" and that he has trouble with the notion of would-be mothers as comedians.

Asked Thursday if he had changed his mind at all because of performers like Melissa McCarthy and Sarah Silverman, the 87-year-old Lewis said of women performing broad comedy: "I can't see women doing that. It bothers me."

"I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator," he said. "I just can't do that."

Fuck this 87-year-old overused enema bag and his remedial ideas of what women should do and fuck the reporter who asked him to reiterate his idiocy. It's like asking a great white shark, "Do you still want to eat seals even after one wore sunglasses in the delightful 1994 family picture Andre?" Time is only going to set him deeper in his defective ways.

It's like someone said in the recent Showtime doc Why We Laugh: Funny Women, "Really? But falling on a banana peel's hilarious. It's so hilarious that when Dean Martin left you, you had to go to France, a place where they don't speak English. And that's your fan base? Non-English-speaking people is your fan base. That's who gave you a Medal of Honor." Actually, it's like this whole damn four-minute clip.

P.S. Cannes is in France.

[Image via Getty]

All of this arrived Tuesday in a box so big I thought maybe someone was sending me a suffocated animal. I asked my boss John Cook if I could keep it and he said, "Do you even want it?" An iPod and a bottle of Moët? Yes, that is an instant Friday/living Mariah Carey song. Whatever. I was going to watch Soderberg's Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra, anyway (I wanna see Michael Douglas and Matt Damon fuck!). Now I'm gonna watch it in class, like Liberace would if he were alive today and used headphones for the sound on his TV. Anyway, this is the sort of shameless shit that networks do to try to buy positive coverage. We'll see if it works.

Here is the note that HBO sent with this package:

Liberace once said, "Too much of a good thing is wonderful!", and we couldn't agree more. The legendary entertainer lived lavishly and embraced a lifestyle of excess both on and off stage. To bring you a taste of that luxury and celebrate the premiere of HBO's Behind the Candelabra, please enjoy this selection of items inspired by the King of Bling himself. From a custom Moet & Chandon bottle to selections from the film's soundtrack (available May 21st) you have everything you need to gete in the spirit for the premiere of Behind the Candelabra.

It was not inevitable that Joe Francis would issue an apology for his remarks to The Hollywood Reporter suggesting the jurors who recently convicted him for unlawful imprisonment should be executed. But what was inevitable is that if an apology were to surface, it would be full of assy qualifications, self-entitlement and victim-playing. And so it has, and so it is. Below is the "apology" Francis issued because someone obviously told him to do it, although they failed to inform him how to do it:

I deeply regret the remarks attributed to me in the interview with the Hollywood Reporter. They were hurtful and do not reflect my true feelings. While I disagree with the jury's verdict as I am completely innocent of the charges and intend to appeal, I was afforded a fair trial, and if I lose at the appellate level, I will reluctantly but fully accept the jury's verdict. This was a 6 hour interview with The Hollywood Reporter where I detailed to the reporter all of the evidence and why I believed the evidence showed I am 100% innocent. The reporter also interviewed my attorney David Houston for over 3 hours, but failed to include one shred of evidence from the trial that proved beyond a reasonable doubt my innocence. I did NOT commit a crime at all whatsoever. All that was publicized were my most intemperate remarks that were borne out of frustration but with no intent to cause anyone harm. I am not, nor have I ever been a violent person. My comments are appalling, but anyone who has ever been wrongfully convicted of a crime that they did NOT commit would be as frustrated as I am. I want to apologize to all the jurors, the court, the City Attorney and my attorneys for my comments that were manipulated by the media, and please know I am truly ashamed of my conduct. I am truly, truly sorry. I hope everyone will understand I was not being serious and that I fully and deeply apologize for my remarks.

[Image via Getty]

After we published our post on the Hollywood Reporter story, in which Joe Francis said that the "retarded" jury that convicted him earlier this month "should be shot dead," we received an email from one of the 12 not-so-angry people who sat on jury. We followed up with this person by phone to produce the following account of the trial and the response to Francis' insults and allegations.

I've never said anything about this before, but I was on the jury for Joe Francis's recent trial in LA. I thought it was funny when Francis told the NYDN that we were "mentally challenged" but this [Hollywood Reporter interview] is something else. It's a little bizarre to have someone looking into a camera and suggesting you be shot, even if he has no idea what I look like since he never showed up at the trial. If anything, it reaffirms the decision we came to — unanimously, of course, after only about a day and half of deliberations — as one of the charges was directly related to the vague (and no so vague) threats he made against the victim he assaulted to keep her from filing a police report. I'm just thinking about all the nice, salt-of-the-earth people on that jury that Joe Francis is suggesting be shot. There were some older, middle-aged, retired women. There were four middle-aged men. Some women were in their 30's. All different races. I was the youngest.

A lot of the older people on there had no idea who he was. Some of us did, though. During jury selection, Francis’ lawyer Steve Levine asked a pool I was in at one point, “How many people have heard of Joe Francis?” A whole bunch of people, including me, raised our hands. He said, “OK, that’s fine. I’m not going to kick you off for knowing who Joe Francis is. I just want him to get a fair trial.” His own lawyer said that doesn’t disqualify anyone from serving on this jury. We just had to have an open mind, common sense and no conflicts of interest.

Celebrity trials go on forever. I don’t think there was anybody that was jumping up and down to get on this jury, but I don’t think there was anyone who was actively begging to get out of it. There were some people who had genuine conflicts of interest and they were dismissed. I don’t like people that actively try to get out of jury duty. If you like paved roads and you like fresh water, pay your taxes and do jury duty when you are asked. It’s a civic responsibility. I wasn’t trying to get out of it, but I also wasn’t thinking, “Oh my god, I have to do this. It’s going to make my life.”

Unlike Joe, his driver and co-defendant showed up in court everyday. We found him not guilty, but I don’t want that to suggest there was a vendetta against Joe Francis. They told us the first day during the voir dire that Francis wouldn’t be showing up because the court had given him an exemption. Steve Levine asked if we’d hold that against him. He didn’t ask me personally, just other people. I thought, though, that no, I wouldn’t hold that against him. If a court told me I didn’t have to show up, I wouldn’t be showing up or going everyday. If it were a parking ticket or something, my ass wouldn’t be there.

We just chose to rely on the evidence presented and (mostly) on the testimony of three women who described the night as one of the worst in their lives. All three are in their 20's and they had very emotional testimonies. The 911 calls from that night, the several of them, would be harrowing for a lot of people to hear – not necessarily the jurors or people in the courtroom, but people in general. Those were very emotionally charged calls that were not coming from a place of, “I’m just trying to get one over on a celebrity so I can file a civil suit.”

I'm sorry Joe Francis didn't like our decision, but I genuinely hope he takes this as a lesson that his actions do carry actual consequences—for him, for us, and most of all for the woman he assaulted. He could have caused a concussion, and they checked for one at the hospital. I don't expend much energy thinking about Joe Francis either way, although I do believe he's guilty of the crimes we convicted him of and I could live without the whole lined up and shot thing. Honestly, Joe, I wish you the best. Now please stop talking about me.

[Image via Getty]

The bottle has the film's title printed on it in bling, which is also very late-90s hip-hop.

Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis has gone wild and it's way better than a bath full of bouncing, barely (or not-at-all) legal coeds. On May 7, the day after he was found guilty of false imprisonment (three counts), assault causing great bodily injury (one count), and dissuading a witness from reporting (one count), The Hollywood Reporter nabbed an exclusive interview with the supreme douche, who was highly emotional and, as revealed later in the ensuing profile, drunk.

Before anything, watch his message to the jurors who convicted him, please. Seriously, whatever you are doing, watch this now. I don't care if you are crowning with the first of two twins or the second of two twins or bleeding out of your eyes and/or dick (which is smaller than Joe Francis' if you dislike him, but more on that in a second). Just watch this:

In case you didn't, here is what Francis says:

"Just to convict people because you’re jealous of them is retarded. And you’re a retarded jury and you should be shot dead. You should. If they had the death penalty for juries, you should be shot. Dead. By a firing squad."

(There is a longer version of this rant atop the Hollywood Reporter's post. I recommend that as well, even if you are in the middle of having triplets and they're all coming out of your smaller-than-Francis dick at once.)

Within the text, he elaborates on his notions of other people's jealousy:

"I have private jets, I have a great life, I'm a good-looking guy. I'm not conceited, but like — look, I have girls around me all the time, whatever I want. I make a lot of money. It's a great life. If I wasn't me, I'd fucking hate me."

He also describes his feelings on jurors in general — they are stupid until proven on his side:

"The problem with the jury system is that anyone who's not smart enough to come with an excuse to get out of jury duty doesn't get out. Only the stupidest of the stupidest people end up on juries, you know? I've never met a smart person who's done jury duty."

Also! His critics are his critics because they have small dicks and he doesn't.

"You know why I've been criticized, why I've been brutalized?" he says. "Anybody who criticizes me, anybody who — it's just a jealous guy. Everybody who says, 'Oh, Joe Francis is this' — look at their penis and tell me if it's small. Tell me!"

And how about the size of his own, um, manhood? He laughs gleefully. "It's been widely reported my penis is huge, but look, I have nothing to prove" — upon which he tries to do just that, tussling with his rather sweet girlfriend and urging her to tell me about his assets. She wriggles away, mortified.

"Tell him!" he laughs.

"No way!" she yells, vanishing into the kitchen.

He also lies about being placed on death row in Panama City, Fla., in 2007, when he was thrown in jail for contempt of court in the case involving his cameramen filming two 17-year-old girls. "They ended up moving me to death row," he lies. "They held him in a wing of that jail that had the most dangerous criminals, potentially headed for death row," one of his eight lawyers clarifies.

He says he is a "sophisticated, classy" guy, who did "a nice thing" for the women he was just convicted of falsely imprisoning:

"It just proves that any celebrity in Hollywood should never give a ride home to any girls. I mean, there were 20 people in the afterparty. They [say they] got their head slammed on a tile floor and they were imprisoned here for hours. They said it was here on the tile floor. I don't see any tile right here. Now you've been here for hours. Have you been imprisoned?"

Really, all four pages of the article are tremendous. It's like reading three seasons of a reality show, in which a hateful dickhead dies an agonizing death. Writer Stephen Galloway hedges momentarily, assuring us that Francis is "generous, trusting, warm and eager to please" ("I'm a nice guy!" says Francis, lover of the word "retarded," hater of jurors and of "monster, piece-of-shit asshole" Steve Wynn), but the story's kicker is world-class shade. I'm not even going to spoil it for you.

[Image via Getty]

On last night's episode of Ke$ha's #yolol-fueled MTV reality show My Crazy Beautiful Life, she peed into a bottle and then drank it. Just to be, you know, funky. She's so unusual. She's such a freak. She's so My Strange Addiction.