You Look Beautiful Like That: I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down

Famous people. They're just like us, only thinner, wealthier and more attractive.*

*Note this final clause does not apply in certain cases: see Danes, Claire.

Anyways, they do tend to have more money, more babies, (more babydaddies, even), better clothes (or at least more expensive clothes), lots of free stuff, drugs, hookers, etc. That's why it's funny when bad things happen to them. One of the funniest bad things that can happen to a celebrity is that they fall over.

(And yes, I also laugh at chimps dressed in human clothing, birds walking, and pictures of cats doing funny things - humour doesn't always have to be sophisticated, and I bet if I write the word "titties" real big you'll laugh, so there!)

So, famous people falling over. It's rarely a less than joyful experience, and it's the kind of celebrity fun the whole family can share. Sex tapes and drug scandals are not really a fun conversation to have with grandma; but famous falls? Granny'll be laughing with the best of us! (Also, old people fall over a lot, so it's both entertaining for them and informative.)

YLBLT would now like to present the Top Five Celebrity Pratfalls Of All Time**.

**in this instance "of all time" means "that we could remember offhand".

In (Or Out of) Her Shoes

To start us off, let's look at an amateur effort from Cameron Diaz:

Note that Diaz never hits the ground, and thus this is never going to be a classic fall. Also, the lack of abject horror on her face detracts from the comedy. The whole point of laughing at celebrities falling over is that their faces make a little :-O of horror and they look all skewiff - by remaining resolutely upright Diaz has committed a fatal error. We are not amused.

This makes the grade though for Diaz's later cunning which sees A-list celebrities kneeling down and attending to her feet:

Getting Lucy Liu to be your personal servant on the red carpet is worth almost as much as an arse-over-tit fall.

Fall of an Angel

A more impressive effort comes from young Miss Church. Best known for smoking, swearing, drinking, wearing big gold hoop earrings and "my barbie is a crack whore" t-shirts, Charlotte occasionally sings. Here she is demonstrating the "drunken fall". This really is a comic category of its own, quite apart from the red carpet fall or the catwalk fall (more of which later).

We have the added delight of seeing that the celebrity in question is absolutely off their tits; we get their best drunken "huh?" look, and generally there is the bonus of scraggy hair, boobies flying everywhere and make-up sliding off the aforementioned "huh?" face.

Do You Prefer "Gravity Victim" or "Vertically Challenged"?

Of course the drunken elements can detract from the sheer, simple pleasure of watching someone famous look quite silly. They're not really aware of their surroundings and thus the combined anger and embarrassment that should be writ large on their face for us to laugh at is missing. Luckily, there is always a po-faced holier-than-thou teetotal PC celebrity on hand to fall or be pushed for our amusement:

Note the furious contorted brow, the hilarious flying hair, the detail of the knees going one way as the ankles decide that they will be travelling elswhere.

See also how the crowds of minders and security can do nothing to save the celebrity from the fall. It will get us all, eventually. You can't run, you can't hide, you can only wear sensible shoes and hope that this:

never happens to you.

If the Shoe Fits...Wait, I Said IF!

Speaking of sensible shoes, remember this?

Man, that was funny.

(I never said I had any witty remarks to make on the subject of people falling over. Like chimps in human clothing or gigantic cats, people falling over is a big cake of funny that requires no word icing.)

I wanna see it again:

Oh boy, that was good.

I'm Free, Free-Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallin'!

So, we've seen Cameron lose her shoe - kinda dull, although an A-lister attending a premiere shoeless has its own amusement factor. (Unless they are Joss Stone trying to be interesting and creative, in which case they should realise that foregoing shoes just makes them look dumb, along with their nasty straggly hair.)

We've seen young Charlotte stagger from a taxi - sadly although I've googled til I just can't google no more I cannot find the excellent series of photographs that demonstrate exactly where she THWUMP! bumped her head on the taxi door. Just imagine it instead and the effect is almost as good, especially as you know it's true.

Alicia Silverstone brought us the sober vegan fall, which is better than the drunken fall because there is just no excuse for such clumsiness, and makes her look absolutely Clueless (yes, I went there). Hilarious.

The Naomi Campbell-Vivienne Westwood effort will always hold a fond place in my heart, mostly because Naomi Campbell is very tall and has an elegance about her body, which makes her fall all the funnier. (The rule is, if you are short, squat and look like Danny DeVito, the fall will be merely amusing. If you are, say, Grace Kelly, it will be hilarious.)

Spring, Summer, Winter - Fall's the Best of 'Em All!

And now we come to the best fall of all. It is one of the most recent, and it's special for oh-so-many reasons:

We have video evidence - motion beats a photograph any day.
It involves so-much-for-sisterhood bitchery and a "screw her!" hair toss
All our other falls involved small crowds and limited space - this fall was presented on a stage, in front of thousands, on the tee vee!
It is followed by a helpful hand up and a confused look on the celebrity's face that is almost as brilliant as the consolatory pat on Fabio's arm from a 12-year-old girl after he killed a goose with his face on a rollercoaster that one time.

For your continued amusement (because this will never, ever get old), I present: