I Never 'Got' Andy Rooney

I never understood the appeal of Andy Rooney. He would do the coda of '60 Minutes' and talk about the stuff in his desk (which was pretty much the same stuff in anybody's desk), the price of coffee (and how the size of the coffee cans has evolved. Thanks, Andy) , or some meaningless study of the different kinds of hats people wear with equally meaningless comments like: 'What's with all these hats?'.

Getting punk'd by Ali G. (Sasha Baron Cohen) really showed how cranky he was. If you haven't seen it, it's probably on YouTube. To briefly recap, Ali G. asks absurd questions like 'How come the media doesn't report an airplane crash before it happens', and Rooney just gets mad. The fact that he didn't 'get it', that it was a put-on, showed me how humorless and out of touch he was.

And to top everything off, in his final good-bye '60 Minutes' segment, Rooney proceeded to talk about how he hates being recognized and thinks that people that write to him are dumb.

If Rooney truly hated being recognized and had such contempt for his fans, he either should have quit the show or at the least kept his dislike for celebrity to himself. Besides, I don't even buy it that he didn't like being recognized. People who want to be on television, whether it's the star of TV's biggest hit or an extra in the background of a commercial, really do WANT to be on TV. 

Andy Rooney may have in fact been the luckiest man in show business. His observations were neither interesting, funny or insightful. They were the musings of a creepy misogynist. And while he claimed to have 'left wing' leanings, I don't recall him ever actually 'doing' anything besides complaining about stuff (that didn't ever matter) and going to football games.