Are the British okay? Between the queen’s death, Liz Truss resigning right in front of my lettuce, The Great British Bake Off’s Mexican week, The Great British Bake Off’s West End musical, and James Corden’s self-appointment as the U.K.’s Ambassador of Snotty Bitchery, it has been a rough autumn. Corden was supposed to be spending his October promoting something called Mammals that will apparently exist on Amazon Prime soon. Instead, he started off the month by being outed for “yelling like crazy†at a server who had the audacity to get his breakfast order wrong at Balthazar, and the narrative has become impossible for him to escape. (Are we, by writing about it, actively feeding that narrative like a prized piggy? Ya, duh.)
What was meant to be a simple promotional interview with the New York Times on Thursday, October 20, became a portrait of a celebrity who simply is not sorry for heinous behavior toward people in the service industry. “I haven’t done anything wrong on any level,†Corden told the Times’ Dave Itzkoff. “So why would I ever cancel this [interview]? I was there. I get it. I feel so Zen about the whole thing. 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.â€
To gain a reputation for treating people poorly is one thing. We’ve all heard variations on the “waiter rule,†which says the surest judge of someone’s character is how they behave toward waitstaff. But it’s another thing entirely for the nightmare customer to think he did nothing wrong and not even try to fake-apologize for it.
To be clear, Corden does not deny the things that restaurateur Keith McNally claims he said to his staff or the “nasty†way in which he said them. Furthermore, he finds nothing about it worthy of apology or media coverage. His justification is that rude customer behavior “happens every day. It’s happening in 55,000 restaurants as we speak. It’s always about eggs.†It’s exactly that frequency of bad behavior that makes it even more notable that McNally would single him out as “the most abusive†of all his bad customers.