Getting a PhD in English from Yale is not like eventually completing a stint in rehab. You don't have to do it in order to remain insurable in the eyes of film producers who decide whether you can work on a project that involves paying hundreds of people pulling down buckets of collectively bargained-for wages every five minutes you stand around picking your nose. No one gives a crap how well James Franco does in college, is what we're saying.
Yet his GPA hovered between 3.5 and 4.0 as a working undergrad and now he's, yeah, earning that useless doctorate and planning to go on to Rhode Island School of Design because he cares, you guys. If life has meaning, then James Franco is absolutely going to find out what it is and share it with his Instagram followers via phone-vid the very instant he knows, the same way he broke the news that he'll be the subject of a Comedy Central roast premièring Labor Day weekend. Squee! (The network presents only one roast per year, however confusing the rerun schedule may be.)
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We were as pleasantly baffled by this revelation as the rest of you, having been under the impression that This Is the End was the Comedy Central roast of James Franco, but this just means more for our entertainment dollar, kind of, so yay.
Comedy Central's obtained the rights to show Francophrenia, a sort of experimental mockumentary about Franco's 2009-2012 appearance as a villain on General Hospital, on its digital and video-on-demand platforms following the roast. Why? If you have to ask, you'll never know.
Celebrity news, such as what you've just absorbed, is a rare visitor to Jackalope Ranch. It's gotta be spesh. 'Cause it's ordinary people like yourselves who are doing the things that blow our minds every day: inventing useless things, wearing repulsive things, having sex with unimaginable things, developing theories about pointless things, animating GIFs of all those things, working tirelessly to preserve the most bitey animals and promote the least relevant apps, and occasionally doing something really, really cool.
Sure, we could have gone with the video of Justin Bieber urinating in a mop bucket that was just leaked, but, poor dude, there's just no wow factor there any more. He's that stepbrother you're just waiting on jail or the Army to wipe away from your comparatively functional routine.
Don't count the Biebs out yet, though -- they took away his monkey and apparently most of his shirts, yet he made the first Instagram video post (a thing that's only been a thing since June 20) that garnered a million likes, and almost no one's Twitter account contained more fervent group discussion of the Egyptian revolution. Truth? We don't even know what we're typing any more.
But whatever happens, James Franco is ironic and hot and has a damn sense of humor and is fortunate enough not to have become famous before he was 20. He will do anything -- anything! -- and there's no apparent air of desperation surrounding his wide-ranging endeavors. This is a stretch, but it's possible he's the Chuck Norris of the next generation.
