James Corden Says “I Didn’t Do Anything Wrong On Any Level”

Are the Brits okay? Between the Queen’s death, Liz Truss’ resignation right in front of my salad, The Great British Bake Off‘s mexican week, The Great British Bake Off‘s West End Musical and James Corden’s self-proclamation as Snotty Bitchery’s ambassador to the UK, it’s been a tough autumn. Corden was supposed to spend his October promoting something called mammals Apparently this will be coming to Amazon Prime soon. Instead, he started the month by being outed for “screaming like crazy” at a server who had the audacity to get his breakfast order from Balthazar wrong, and the narrative has become impossible for him to escape. (By writing about it, are we actively feeding this narrative like a precious piggy? Ya, duh.)

What was meant to be a simple promotional interview with the New York Times on Thursday October 20th became the portrait of a celebrity who simply has no regrets for the heinous behavior towards people in the service industry. “I didn’t do anything wrong on any level,” Corden said Times’ David Itzkoff. “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 among all of us. it is below you It is certainly among your publication.”

Earning a reputation for treating people badly is one thing. We’ve all heard variations on the “waiter’s rule,” which says that the safest measure of a person’s character is how they behave around waiters. But it’s quite another thing for the nightmare customer to believe they didn’t do anything wrong and not even try to apologize for it.

To be clear, Corden isn’t denying the things restaurateur Keith McNally claims to have said to his employees or the “nasty” way he said them. Beyond that, he finds nothing worthy of an apology or media coverage. His reasoning is that rude customer behavior “happens every day. It’s happening in 55,000 restaurants right now. It’s always about balls.” It’s that frequency of misbehavior that makes it so even more notable that McNally singled him out as “the most abusive” of all his bad clients.

On Oct. 21, McNally responded to Corden’s statements in an Instagram post, which read, “I don’t want to kick a man when he’s down. Especially one that’s worth $100 million, but when James Corden said in the NY Times yesterday that he “didn’t do anything wrong, on any level,” was he kidding? Or did he deny abusing my servers? Whatever Corden meant, its implication was clear: He didn’t do it.”

This is like a test question straight out of the dumb celebrity drama LSATs. Corden doesn’t seem to think yelling at a server is “something wrong” because a lot of other people do, so he doesn’t think he did anything wrong. McNally believes that mistreatment of employees is something that is assumed and accepted as “wrong” (of course!) by all parties, and thus interprets Corden’s testimony as a lie denying the allegations. He wants Corden to “live up to his almighty initials” (Oof!) “and come in. If the immensely talented actor wants to regain the respect he had from all his fans (all 4) for this incident, then he should at least admit that he did something wrong.” Before you read that actor’s line as a compliment, says McNally probably just that Corden is a good liar.

McNally then gives Corden an ultimatum: “If he goes one step further and apologizes to the 2 waiters he offended, I’ll let him eat at the Balthazar for free for the next 10 years.” The ball is in Corden’s court, to him wipe the egg off your face. Let’s hope there is no white in it.