TOM THE DANCING BUG: Charlie Sheen, in "Rhymes with WINNING"!

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tubacat

The fact that @betatron noted how different Mr Sheen is now from how he behaved in the past makes me agree that he’s manic. Also the fact that he’s acting manic (as in the “fun” pole of bipolar – and yes, I know, from experience, that it’s not really fun).

It’s too bad he doesn’t have someone who recognizes the disorder, and cares enough about him to get him help (eg, lithium)…
Anonymous

I don’t watch television. Who is Charley Sheen?
Anonymous

I think my wife summed the whole Charlie Sheen thing up best when we saw the Good Morning America coverage of it this morning:

Oh He’s Just Trying to be Clever.
Anonymous

SamSam,

Don’t be swayed. It’s not hard to tell if someone is an a-list actor. Here’s the breakdown:

1. Did you start in film and are still in major film roles? A list
2. Did you start in TV and are now in major film roles? A list
3. Did you formerly star in major roles, but now take crap roles for money? A list
4. Did you formerly star in major film roles, but now have minor film roles? Formerly A list
5. Did you start in film and now have major TV roles? B list
6. Did you start in film and now have minor TV roles? Former B list
7. Did you start in TV and are still in major TV roles? B list
8. Did you start in TV and are now in minor TV roles? Former B list
9. Did you start in TV or film, and are now not working? C list

Examples:
1. Daniel Day Lewis
2. Clint Eastwood / Johnny Depp
3. Robert De Niro
4. Burt Reynolds
5. Charlie Sheen
6. I dunno; hey, I work for a living…
7. David Caruso
8. Vicki Lewis
9. Kirk Cameron
Unmutual

I don’t think so. I think he’s nuts. It’s not a big deal, the world is full of crazy people. What makes it amusing / exploitative is that in Sheen’s case, the only thing really separating him from the homeless crack addicted panhandler is that he happens to have a crapload of money, which means he will probably self destruct and die before he is forced to change his behavior because he can no longer afford it.

But who knows. If they do shut down 2.5 men for good, I’d expect a real meltdown from Sheen to be coming forthwith. He’s got this expensive and dangerous lifestyle and if his cash flow suddenly, drastically changes, it’s going to cause problems, I don’t care who you are. Look at Nick Cage! Didn’t he have to sell some of his castles in Europe because of bankruptcy or something? How could Nick Cage go bankrupt, he was a bona-fide A-lister for a while there, AND he’s a Coppola!

But as for the comic, I like it, because it puts all this nonsense in perspective. The guy makes millions of ****ing dollars reading a script written by hacks. He says stuff and does stuff in front a camera and an audience who is told when they are supposed to laugh. We value people like Sheen in our society more than doctors, scientists, lawyers, teachers, and so on, and once in a while it goes to their heads, and this is the spectacle you see.
- bcsizemo
  
  I’m not sure I would go so far as to call Nick Cage an A list actor.
  
  Outside of the National Treasure movies I’m not sure he has been in a movie that turned a good profit in a while.
  
  ie: Ghost Rider….
  - Anonymous
    
    What about “Nicolas Cage Losing His Sht”?
  - Unmutual
    
    Well note that I used the past tense . . . though I wouldn’t call him B-List. He has been in his share of box office successes . . . NT being the most recent, but also crap like Con Air and Face Off has turned a few dollars profit as well.
    
    But really Nick has had a handful of truly excellent roles, my two favorites being Raising Arizona and Adaptation, that showed he was more than just a can of ham. He’s a great comedic actor who is now unfortunately getting typecast as a scenery chewing nutjob. Hey, whatever pays.
Percival Dunwoody

I have seen the future, and must say that I found this depiction of the powers possessed by Charlie Sheen to be laughably inaccurate. President Sheen (the first Rock Star from Mars to become President of the Solar System) does not have the ability to fly unaided; rather, he uses a mercury surfboard to travel the cosmos. – Percival Dunwoody, Idiot Time Traveler From 1909
- Anonymous
  
  Percival,
  
  I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Why won’t you return my tray of cold cuts?
- Laroquod
  
  Impostor!
- benher
  
  You know something, I have implored,… nay… begged you to appear in more comincs in the comment threads of the past 16 or so Tom the Dancing Bug posts.
  
  Don’t make me travel to 2509 to kick your ass! (or in olde tyme speak… um… assail your posterior!)
das memsen

What’s all this bru-ha-ha about C. Sheen?
ill lich

It occurred to me yesterday that Charlie Sheen’s hobby is trying to outdo his father’s insane Apocalypse Now “still in Saigon” opening scene in his spare time. What a son, always trying to live up to his dad’s image.
ROSSINDETROIT

I just looked at myself in the mirror. I don’t look to me like someone who gives a flip what Charlie Sheen does/says, yet all week people have been starting conversations with me about him. Please, let’s talk about the weather instead. Everyone cares about that.
- karl_jones
  
  Please, let’s talk about the weather instead. Everyone cares about that.
  
  If you don’t like Charlie Sheen winning in Two and Half Men, just wait five minutes.
  
  [Memo to self: resist urge to find out what the hell "winning" means.]
senorglory

Sheen should be cast as the new IronMan.
Teller

Anon’s Apocalypse Now reference is interesting. I watched Sheen last night on English Larry King’s show and he machine-gunned like Hopper: “Hey, man, you don’t talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll say, “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life?” That, crossed with Brian Wilson, the Giant’s closer.
jacques45

With a few minor modifications, this same comic would fit for Tom Cruise and his exploits.
Anonymous

The awesome flying powers of Charley Sheen are not through a mercury powered surf-board, as many might think. They actually work through his special powers of inhaling cigarette smoke through his nostrils! Winning!
SamSam

Isn’t this that B-list actor whose dad was a movie star, so they gave him a B-list sitcom? I, too, don’t understand all the fuss. A Hollywood actor goes on a drugs and alcohol binge? Hold the front page!
- Anonymous
  
  @SamSam
  
  um, by “B-list sitcom” do you mean an insanely popular sitcom that pays him over $1 million an episode? are you aware of the ratings for his show?
  
  you’d better stay out of Charlie Sheen’s octagon, buddy.
- Anonymous
  
  B-list? Hardly. Two and Half Men is #1 in the ratings and has been for a few years. I don’t care if you don’t watch it, but at least try to get your facts straight. This debacle is costing untold millions of dollars.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    This debacle is costing untold millions of dollars.
    
    Costing? Or… saving? Sheen gets $1.78 million per episode this season. Multicamera sitcoms take a week to shoot. If their shoot day is Friday, you can expect a table read of a new episode on Monday, blocking and rehearsing on Tuesday and Wednesday, network run-throughs and pre-shooting of some scenes on Thursday, then shooting in front of the live audience on Friday. Then back to a new episode’s table read on Monday. Occasionally the production takes a week off for the writers to catch up, during which the actors aren’t working.
    
    So. $1.78 million for five days of work. A couple dozen weeks a year. And now he says he wants $3 million per episode if CBS wants him to come back.
    
    I bet a bag of circus peanuts that this bridge is permanently burned. CBS would be nuts to bring him back. Not because they’re necessarily the wronged party in this, but man oh man what an appalling precedent that would set. Dick Wolf would have just renamed the show “One and a Half Men.”
    - Teller
      
      I’ll take that bet.
      “Charlie! He’s no Angel, but He’s Back!”
  - SamSam
    
    Really?? I honestly had no idea Two and a Half Men was so popular.
    
    I guess I rarely watch TV, but it always seemed on at some early time slot when no one watches anything and the only thing on are Seinfeld reruns and… I don’t even know… That 70s Show reruns? Either way, flipping past it it always looked exactly like single every other boring sitcom-with-laugh-track that’s appeared in the last 20 years.
    
    I’ve never met anyone that admitted to watching Two and a Half Men, although I guess I’ve never asked. But people tell me all the time about some episode of 30 Rock or the Office. Different demographic, I guess?
Anonymous

As a mental health professional, and having heard Charlie Sheen’s recent rants, I think there is a very high probability that his current mental state is reflective of either a hypomanic or manic episode. He is thought disordered, with tangentiality in his speech which could be an indication of a psychosis, and there is evident grandiosity in his thought content.

I think he is likely suffering from a severe mental illness at this time.
It is sad to see people making fun out of this, and it’s consequences in terms of his own actions and utterances, but it’s probably out of ignorance rather than malice.

If the guy is a being a bit quirky, by all means have a go at him, but if he’s evidently mentally ill, don’t contribute to the ubiquitous stigma that people with real mental illnesses have to put up with on a daily basis.

Go look up ‘mania’ on wikipedia for a start.
- DoctressJulia
  
  Yep, that’s the first thing that I thought: Mania. Tiger blood? WTF? I don’t even want to know. It does fall under the category of grandoise delusions…
cinemajay

Ah, but the joke’s are never as funny when you realize what a sick person he is.
betatron

Hah! I spent three of four hours with Charlie several years ago. He wanted to get a feel for the drama of running the Tevatron. He kept asking me, “where’s the drama in this moment”. Well… if i push the wrong button I blow up the Tevatron and 3000 people are out of a job. “That’s it?” That, and i’ll make a crater about the size of Rhode Island, centered about 700 meters from here. (obviously not true, but i was getting annoyed). He took more notes and left. I thought he was kind of funny, in a doesn’t-know-how-full-of-himself-he-is way.

I always wondered what movie he was ginning up for.
- betatron
  
  I’m feeling a little guilty about the impression i painted. If i don’t, the karma train is going to flatten me. Charlie was polite and quite interested, just (as one would expect of any movie star) really clueless as to what was going on. I also want to retract my hyphenate description and substitute “earnest”. His questions were painfully earnest; i dont’ think he got the answers he was looking for that day. One thing is for certain, he’s very much not the guy we’re watching melt down on national tv. This pains me and I need to apologize for taking a rail shot off him.
- Anonymous
  
  @betatron Ginning. Rhymes with winning.
ROSSINDETROIT

My wife thinks the current meltdown is an 11d chess move to boost his career. Exploiting the slingshot effect of a sudden drop in status to fling him up onto the A list. It’s risky. One miscalculation and you fall into the sun.
- Kimmo
  
  I know where Charlie’s coming from…
  
  I tried coke the other day.
  
  My wife thinks the current meltdown is an 11d chess move to boost his career. Exploiting the slingshot effect of a sudden drop in status to fling him up onto the A list. It’s risky. One miscalculation and you fall into the sun.
  
  Someone should tag along with him with a crew while he’s riding this high… he could go hang out with Robert Downey and they could, like, do stuff.
  
  Bang, there’s a show. I bet it’d shit on Two and a Half Men.
  
  Or maybe he could team up with that Howard Stern guy or something… right now he’s on fire; more of his stream of consciousness should be documented.
  
  He’s a peacock. Flying into a rainbow!
  - Jean-Luc Turbo
    
    How about Sheen and Downey team up for “Two and a Half Ironmen,” with subtitle: “There Can Only Be One”?
    
    But I feel like I’m being unfair to Robert Downey, Jr. As it appears that he’s done his self-exorcism…
- kpkpkp
  
  That’s odd – I was thinking the same thing – we get all this fury and then things settle down and the BS is soon forgotten.
  
  My other question would be, what lead is being buried by this lame ass distraction?
Anonymous

A psychology analysis for Charlie Sheen
http://www.psychology-advice.net/tag/charlie-sheen
Anonymous

Charlie’s Apocalypse Now was Platoon.
ackpht

Charlie Sheen in the MCR? That must have been a trip.
Screedler

Insightful commentary on the comment http://discoveringalcoholic.com/alcoholism/tom-the-dancing-bug-charlie-sheen-edition
durfsmurf

I like that style of taking a very accurate pic of charlie and his costars and simplifying it to fit in with the comic. It works better than using a photo-realistic pic or a cartoon that only sorta looks like the person.
Unmutual

Also Nick won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas. The guy is no Dolph Lundgren
- jhavatar
  
  Yeah, but does Nick have a master’s degree in chemical engineering or Grace Jones as an ex.
oscar

Tom Cruise and his exploits? Here you go (special appearance by Charlie Sheen):
http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2004/08/14

and one more:
http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2005/07/09
ackpht

Network TV is SO 20th century.
sapere_aude

I’m the same age as Charlie Sheen (in fact, we were born in the same month); yet I can’t help but get the feeling that he has done a lot more living than I have, but somehow I’m a lot more mature than he is. Weird.
Glenn Fleishman

This is the typical left-wing approach to everything. Blame the perpetrator! You right-wing socialists, and your birth certificates, and Charlie Sheen. Why are you attacking small farmers? And postal workers?

TOM THE DANCING BUG: Charlie Sheen, in "Rhymes with WINNING"!

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