James Corden hasn’t monitored the social media reaction to the scandal he faced this week.
“I haven’t really read anything. It’s strange. It’s strange when you were there,” Corden said. “I think I’m probably going to have to talk about it on Monday’s show. My feeling, often, is, never explain, never complain. But I’ll probably have to talk about it.”
It being that, on Monday, famed restaurateur Keith McNally publicly accused Corden of being “the most abusive customer” to servers at his New York City restaurant, Balthazar, since the venue opened 25 years ago.
McNally tweeted that he had banned Corden, whom he called “a tiny cretin of a man,” and gave two examples of the comedian’s alleged bad behavior. Six hours later, he said he removed the ban after Corden called him and “apologized profusely.”
On Thursday, the host of The Late Late Show With James Corden weighed in on the whole saga, which became a popular topic on and off social media, in an interview with the New York Times.
“It feels like such a silly thing to talk about,” Corden told journalist Dave Itzkoff.
Their interview had been planned before the news broke, to talk about Corden’s new Prime Video dramedy Mammals, and Corden didn’t sound like he’d considered backing out.
“I haven’t done anything wrong, on any level,” Corden told Itzkoff. “So why would I ever cancel this? 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.”
Itzkoff reported that he met with Corden over a restaurant breakfast, and they overheard a woman complaining about her eggs. One of the examples that McNally had given of Corden being a bad customer was that he had allegedly berated a server, after the employee presented his wife with an egg yolk omelette with “a little bit of egg white.”
Corden saw the similarities in his own situation.
“Can you imagine now, if we just blasted her on Twitter?” he said. “Would that be fair? This is my point. It’s insane.”
He noted that social media is not everyone, and that no one in New York had come up to him about the story.
He was obviously unhappy that the news media had picked up the story, comparing that to, as Itzkoff put it, “a school principal offering aid to classroom bullies.”
