Would You Rather: James Corden Edition

Question: is James Corden an insufferable prick? I don't think he is, but also, I think he is. Do you understand? It's possible I am being unclear. I do not think, by any valuable metric, if you were to test him for prickishness in lab conditions, James Corden's Prick Score would come out as anything other than "neutral" or "slightly below A Prick". But I – personally – think he is a prick.

I am not alone in thinking James Corden is a prick: everyone within 500 yards of you right now thinks it, too. Again, this might not be universally true, but it isn't universally untrue. Go up to everyone and ask them: hey, do you like James Corden (do not ask your mum: your mum likes him just fine, because he has neat hair and is polite and "tries hard"). Watch the answers roll in. There are three answers, ranging in severity from heaven to hell:

It is weird, isn’t it. And the Corden Conundrum is more urgent now than ever, because James Corden is everywhere. He is the voiceover to every voice and he is in those infernal Confused.com adverts and he was in Ocean’s Eight, for some reason, and his Carpool Karaoke late-night American thing is now the go-to for artists promoting an album, so if you want to see an in any way fun or inventive TV interview with your fave then you have to endure them in a James Corden video, him doing the exact same tut-and-look-over move at the start of every video. "The traffic’s awful," James Corden says, in his little polo shirt, "thank you so much for helping me out," and pause, reveal, and the crowd goes wild. Ariana Grande did one, and Rod Stewart, and Bruno Mars. Madonna did one, and Adele too. Adele! Lovely Adele. But also: Corden! Horrible, insufferable, Corden.

Listen: in an attempt to put a beat on the exact pulse of my disdain for Corden, I have invented a fun game, which is called "Would You Rather: James Corden Edition". The aim of the game is this: I will set out a series of difficult "Would You Rather?" questions. You answer them, internally or out loud (play with a friend!), to the best of your ability. At the end, we will sit, cross-legged and arm-in-arm together, and ask ourselves — what is James Corden? And I’m hoping very much that our collective answer will be: an insufferable prick. But maybe there is another answer. Let us play.

– Would you rather give James Corden £1,000, or have James Corden give you £1,000? Think before you answer this, because you know he would be awful about it.

– Would you rather have a dog – a cute little thing, a miniature dachshund or something, which I will buy for you, as well as a dog-sitter and kennel fees and all the food a dog needs, as well as helping you rent a place where the dog can stay, which can be tricky sometimes, and someone to come over and dogsit a few hours a day so you can go to work – but, once a week, James Corden comes over to visit your dog, and James Corden makes such a thing about your dog. He's taking selfies with it, he goes on a little walk, and when people stop him with the dog he talks to people as if it’s his dog, he is just making so much fuss about this dog, he essentially dog-hogs you, and when he leaves the dog sort of pines at a door for him and the whirlwind of glamour he brings, and you start to suspect the dog secretly loves James Corden much more than it loves you, but then for the other six days of the week – until Corden’s next haunting – the dog belongs to you. It’s either that or no dog. What are you saying to me right now?

– Would you rather do one Big Shop at a supermarket accompanied by James Corden, or watch your mum orgasm exactly once? (In this scenario, James Corden is extremely acting up, in the supermarket – he keeps picking things up "as a joke" and putting them in your trolley, he keeps holding small cans of beans up to his eyes like spectacles, there is a whole half-hour where you try to leave the vegetable aisle but he keeps picking up a courgette and two tomatoes and hooting them around in front of his crotch, whereas for example your mum is modestly under a blanket – she can either be serviced by another human or use whatever methods necessary to get off – and gets the job done relatively quickly; it’s just you have to look her dead in the eyes at the exact moment of climax. That’s not so bad, is it? When you think about James Corden’s voice coming wailing over a supermarket intercom system, desperately calling you by name. James Corden has spilled an entire kilo tub of yoghurt and now he’s gone all embarrassed and red. James Corden in the clothes section jokily trying on an oversized dress. Now: your mum, cumming. Which is it? Which is it? Which is it? You know which one it is. Which is it?)?

– Would you rather take one single punch to the face by a leading boxer – Anthony Joshua would pull the punch because he’s too nice, so let’s say Tyson Fury is going to do it, all raged up after a big roast, and he’s not allowed a glove either, so he’s really going to fuck you – or watch a super-cut of every moment in Carpool Karaoke where Corden’s face reacts to the song, his eyes widen white and his teeth show through his lips in a smile like a scream, and he turns to the artist in the seat next to him waiting for a little catch of recognition in their eyes, and then he turns and inhales just half a breath, about to sing, and then—

(The punch would shatter your nose to irretrievable pieces but the super-cut would last for hours and hours and hours)

– There is also a hand gesture James Corden does when James Corden sings, which looks like he is trying to shake dice deliberately out of time with the song playing, which is always accompanied with some puppyishly excited head bobbing and moving, and again the wide-eyed facial expression. Would you rather: have to do that whole routine – the arm and the bobbing and the "Wow! This song, huh! Turn it up, Adele!" and the tapping the steering wheel – every time you see someone naked ever again in your life, or: never see anyone naked again ever in your life? Porn counts for this too, by the way, so don’t think you’re getting out of it by just watching porn. You have to do the bobbing thing even if you’re alone in bed, one leg under the duvet, sickeningly illuminated by the cold-blue light of your laptop screen—

– The situation is this: you are allowed access to James Corden’s mobile phone for 24 full hours, to do with it what you will. Think of the famous numbers in there: you could text with all the stars. You could arrange to go to lunch with, I don’t know, Bono or something. You could phone his bank and get them to arrange a substantial financial payment to you. Order a limousine. Twenty-four hours! With the phone made of riches and sex and fame! But in exchange, you have 24 hours to tell an anecdote to James Corden without him jumping over and interrupting your punchline, and if you don’t manage it then I’ll, I don’t know, take one of your kidneys out. How you feeling? How confident you feeling? You can live with one kidney. But I’ve never taken a kidney out before. Every time he interrupts you he leans over and touches your forearm very lightly. How confident you feeling?

– I’ll kill one of your three closest friends if you don’t be best friends with James Corden for a year, and that doesn’t sound so bad but it would be. He keeps doing really irritating things like: you go to lunch together, and he gets two extra plates of mozzarella sticks and a whole thing of wine but gets you to split the bill 50:50, even though it’s really close to your payday. Or, like: he keeps referring to famous people by their first name – "me and Tom" – like you know them too. You have to spend one day a week with him, to maintain the friendship, or he starts sending you really long text messages about whether you really like him. He has a significant birthday and expects you to fly to Dubai to celebrate it with him and David Beckham. Once a month he calls you after midnight and asks to come to your house. Tell me: which of your friends am I killing?

– Would you rather spend ten days in the Bahamas – full luxury, first class, everything bought and paid for – but you have to go there with James Corden, or would you rather stay at home and interrogate just exactly why you feel such poisonous hatred to what is, in the grand scheme of things, a very innocuous man?

– You have to spend one month in prison or you have to watch James Corden practising his laugh in the mirror for an hour, these are the only choices I will allow to you.

– Either you have to pore over James Corden’s financial reports and figure out how long it takes him to earn your annual salary (in 2017, it was estimated he made $4 million, a nudge over $10,000 a day, so he almost certainly brings in what you do in a year in well under a week) and from there calculate how much the world appreciates his brand of sweet sincerity much more than it does your brand of sticky cynicism, or… actually, no, there is no "rather" to this one, it’s bummed me out too much—

– James Corden has promised to go to space and die alone there if you can sit in a room and listen as he delivers a sombre and noble to-camera piece for a show scheduled in the hours after a terrorist attack, one that various viral headlines will say was "right in the feels" and "Moving AF", and that Corden is "terror bae". Nobody else is allowed in the room but you and him. The monologue is ten minutes long and he has a whole rehearsed bit where he says "excuse me" and wipes a single tear away with his thumb. Is James Corden dying in space or not.

– Would you rather kill your mum, your dad, or would you rather confront the fact that in this video of James Corden and Patrick Stewart, James Corden is absolutely the one who comes out best in this?

– They’ve invented time travel but it is ultra-exclusive and prohibitively expensive. The world only has the requisite power and resources to send you and four other people on trips back in time (you have to crush a hundred diamonds before you can go back in time, and power a laser for months: Richard Branson is off to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon). You are granted one trip back to the period of your choosing, return journey, but first you must go back in time and sit next to James Corden during every single class he ever took in secondary school. Consider this: consider how often James Corden said "si–ir!" in a semi-faltering (but still v. sycophantic) voice when he was a teen. James Corden, in a blazer, showing off in drama class. James Corden is genuinely friends with one of the teachers. James Corden sobbing because he only got a B on an English test. Do you understand? Imagine James Corden now, but worse, and you have to sit next to that for eight years, while he quietly practises his singing and draws Late, Late Show logos in the back of his jotter. You could go anywhere: the Old West, Victorian London, Ancient Egypt, you could see glorious temples and terrible wars. But first: you have to watch James Corden lord it over some girl from lower sixth because he got made hall monitor and she didn’t. wyd?

– Everyone alive can recall five of the most crippling, flinch-inducing, embarrassing memories in their life. This is just a fact. So many social interactions as experienced from your position, the first person, are horrendous and unfathomable, and to other people they are more-or-less normal. But to you, thinking about them is like being shot in the head with a psychic bullet: you, with your eyes closed against the light, reliving that time you mispronounced your own name to a girl you fancied, or called the teacher "mum", or had your shorts yanked down on a Magalufian boat trip.

Right:

Here are your choices:

You have to go back and relive every single one of those embarrassing moments – the flinching, the agony, the unbearableness of it – or, instead:

You can sit down in a room and quietly admit to yourself that, if you met him, you would probably be extremely charmed by James Corden, and probably leave the situation thinking he was alright.

The time you got drunk at your parent’s big wedding anniversary. When you were sick all down your trousers in that Uber Pool. The time you offered your hand out to shake to what turned out to be the stump of a one-armed man. James Corden, holding your shoulders from behind you, a high-pitched laughing.

The only possible explainer for James Corden’s continued fame is that he is an electric bolt of charisma that just does not, cannot, quite translate to the screen, so that his abundant real-life charm somehow comes through the tube as either mediocre non-committal neutrality (most people, normal people, can stand Corden, at least a little) or sometimes outwardly hateable, and it is you that is wrong about this, not him. All of your favourite celebrities consider them his friend. He has got to the top of a kill-or-be-killed entertainment industry, somehow. He has 10 million followers on Twitter – 10 million – and you can barely break 200 since you locked your account after that United fan called you "Dipshitinho". He is, somehow, doing something, and the fact that you cannot identify that means that, and logic dictates this, you are the one wilfully misinterpreting him, and not the other way around.

Would you rather: realise James Corden is more popular than you will ever be in your lifetime, or change your life around the full 180 it would take for this to no longer be true?

Would you rather: live a lifetime hating James Corden for who he is, or live in his body for a day, enjoying everything he has made for himself?

Would you rather: punch James Corden in the face 100 times, or sing in a car with Elton John?

Or would you: like to admit now that maybe, even though you still think he is the world’s most insufferable prick (and I still do, sorry), that maybe the problem lies with you, and not him?

@joelgolby