Last week, I blogged about my friend’s awkward interchange with infomercial legend Ron Popeil.
I invited blog readers to come up with clever things to say to Mr. Popeil, offering a prize to the best answer.
Having now slogged through hundreds of blog comments on the subject, I’m left with two general conclusions:
- A surprising number of blog readers agreed with me that the right thing to do is just to leave the celebrities alone.
- Nobody (at least at this blog) has anything very interesting to say to a random celebrity.
I read through the blog comments and wasn’t particularly struck by any of them. So I asked some of the researchers who work for me to go through the comments and pick their five favorites. Whenever I’ve done this in the past on subjective Freakonomics quizzes, there has been substantial overlap in opinions about what the best answers are. In this case, however, there was no agreement on the good answers.
Nonetheless, I promised to give some prizes, and I’m going to throw them to my former student Salar Jahedi (commenter 31), who is now a professor at the University of Arkansas. Salar wrote his dissertation about bargains, allowing him the opportunity to walk up to Popeil, look him right in the eye, and truthfully say, “I wrote my PhD dissertation to rationalize your business model.”
I bet that is one greeting that Popeil has never heard before.
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. You can also watch it on 
I’ve had some great luck in life in terms of meeting celebs at various times. When I got to sit next to Al Pacino for 6 hours as we flew from NYC to LA – I waited an hour until they started dinner service and I broke the ice by saying “Al, it’s petty obvious I know who you are – but was really interested in how you choose what movies you make. I’ve liked most of the movies – and I’m always wondering how a guy with such a good track record could end up in some that I really didn’t like” With that we ended up talking for the next 5 hours about movie choices – why certain films got made (favors, $, etc..) He was particularly interested in which movies I did not like and why (1776 anyone? Never enjoyed Sea of Love). Seems like if you can find a common medium and give as much as you get – you can have a perfectly good conversation. The problem with most celebrity encounters is that the non celebs really don’t have all that much to say – so why say it?
What the multitude of Billy Mayes Jokes didn’t win??? why not ? XD
And I was going to submit, “Weren’t you in rehab?”
Upon meeting John Stossel, I asked him, “Aren’t you Michael Moore?” I had him going for a second or two, and then he laughed.
I am a White Sox fan who has lived in Minneapolis for many years. Not exactly Red Sox – Yankees, but still a rivalry.
In 1997, while intending to do something else entirely, I ended up in a hotel ballroom to watch the second Tyson-Holyfield fight. There were multiple TVs scattered around, and I found a seat close to a smaller one. After a couple of the prelims, the Main Event was about 15-20 minutes away, and someone pulled up a chair right next to me. I looked, and it was Frank Thomas, the first baseman of the White Sox, and a former AL MVP.
After greeting each other, I quickly decided that I wasn’t going to be a “fanboy”, so I simply asked, “Who do you like tonight?” That led us into about a 5-10 minute discussion about boxing, after which we watched the bout. After Tyson bit Holyfield’s ear, Thomas nudged my shoulder and asked, “Did that really just happen? Did Mike bite him?”
At the time, I wondered if I made a sound decision not to talk baseball. I think I did, since we were simply two boxing fans who wanted to watch a fight, and I am almost certain any kind of baseball talk would have turned him off and lessened both of our experiences. After all, I wouldn’t have wanted to discuss my work with anyone either.
Quin,
I can’t decide whether I’m surprised or not to see a UHF reference in the Freakonomics blog comments. Either way, well done.
My wife had the fortune of being randomly assigned as a college dorm roommate to a woman that would go on to be in the cast of a couple prime time dramas and as a supporting cast member of major motion pictures. We spent some time with her once post-college and she said that from her point of view, when she talks to someone who wasn’t already part of her life (i.e., is talking to her simply because she is a celebrity) the ones with whom she likes to interact are the ones that ask her about her job and her work. As is the case with many celebrities, she doesn’t like being the object of attention of adoring fans. If someone talks to her she doesn’t want to hear the question “What is it like to be famous?” or about any of the trappings that go with it. She lights up, however, if someone asks her about her experience being a character on a particular show and the routine of her work week.
I haven’t yet had the opportunity to interact with another celebrity but I promised myself that if I did I would try to think of some way to ask the person about their work, or maybe about some specific aspect of their style to show that I have an interest in what they do, rather than an interest in them as a star actor or sports figure.
Many years ago, my wife was working a golf tournament for some charity. She was checking people in, dealing with a large crowd. At one point, someone cuts the line and asks to be registered, and which point she, of course, tells him to get back to the end of the line. The person said, “But I’m XXX XXX!” Not knowing anything about football, she said the expected, “I don’t care who you are; back of the line,” and so he went. One of her co-workers came up to her and pointed out that it was the “XXX XXX Charity Golf Tournament”, and the co-worker went off to get him checked in. Unfortunately, I forget who it was, but I don’t follow football at all, and even I recognized the name when she told the story — it was the random famous football player of the year at that time (but not someone “classic” that would be remembered in a few years).