The hell it is

According to the paper of record, the Evening Herald: “He is the hellraiser of Hollywood with an insatiable appetite for sex, drink and drugs. Now Colin Farrell’s badboy reputation is sweeping Morocco where is he filming Oliver Stone’s new blockbuster, Alexander.

“Drinking till dawn, dropping his trousers in bars and stubbing cigarettes out on the furniture have already sparked complaints. And his co-star, Angelina Jolie, has reportedly moved out of their hotel in disgust at the Dubliner’s behaviour…
“‘He was always getting his bits out when he’d had a few, so much so that we nicknamed him ‘Cockout Colin’,” said a crew member. “We thought it was hilarious but Angelina didn’t and eventually had enough and said she was leaving.”
To all of which Sam Snort can only say: what the hell happened to hellraising?

Big Fella
Let’s go through he charge-sheet item by item (bearing in mind, m’lud, that we accept these allegations have the status of rumour rather than fact and that, if push comes to shove on the steps of the Four Courts, we are happy to accept in advance that Mr Farrell has probably spent all his time in Marrakesh doing yoga, drinking bottled water and attending Legion Of Mary meetings).
Anyway, those sensational charges. No 1: Drinking till dawn.
If this practice makes Colin Farrell a Hollywood hellraiser than he shares his Tinseltown status with, at a conservative estimate, about one million or thereabouts of his fellow countrymen and women. And they’re just the under fifteens.

No 2: dropping his trousers in bars.
Only in bars, eh? What about in the middle of O’Connell Street at rush hour? In Croke Park on All-Ireland Sunday? At the altar rail at midnight mass? Does “Cockout Colin” not realise that good friends of Sam have whipped out the big fella in these locations and many more, as a matter of course, not once but often? And has he never heard that, originating in Ballybunion, there is a ritual in golf whereby a male player’s failure to get his drive past the ladies’ tee requires the exposure of the old pecker for the duration of the short walk to the ball – a practice traditionally referred to as a “fanny” or “knob-out”. And bearing in mind that male golfers, all Pringle sweaters, swollen red faces and big arses, are barely halfway down the evolutionary tree, how exactly does aping their more juvenile pranks possibly qualify as “Hollywood hellraising”?

No 3: stubbing out cigarettes on furniture.
Whew! Rock ’n’ roll! Has Colin never heard ‘Smoke On The Water’? Is he not aware that, back in the day, whenever we half-heartedly stubbed out a spliff, we did it into a state of the art recording console and weren’t happy until the resultant conflagration has consumed an entire Swiss holiday resort? Little dirty ash-marks on a bedroom locker or “a fire in the sky”? You decide which one raises the most hell.
There is also, of course, the matter of Colin’s recreational intake. The Herald again: “The former clean-cut star of Ballykissangel has boasted that he once got through 20 ecstasy tablets, four grammes of cocaine, half an ounce of hash, three bottles of Jack Daniel’s, 12 bottles of wine, 60 pints of beer and 280 cigarettes”.
Sam has a name for that. Breakfast.
Imagine my disappointment then to learn that this was the star’s total intake for a week. Frankly, this is pitiful stuff, the kind of wishy-washy performance which relegates our would-be hellraising superstar to the basement realm of percussionists with minor funk bands, traditional spoons players and, of course, certain top athletes and Premiership footballers.

Midnight Feasts
As for la belle Angelina supposedly making herself scarce “in disgust at the Dubliner’s behaviour”, Sam’s theory is that for someone who spent a goodly period of time up close and personal with my old buddy ‘Wild’ Billy Bob Thornton, her subsequent exposure to the “Marrakesh excess” of our Colin must have felt a bit like swapping midnight feasts with Marilyn Manson for afternoon tea with Marty Whelan.
Either that or she was understandably distracted by the rumour fast sweeping the souk that a camel train had just pulled into the fabled city, loaded down with exotic jewels, spices, powders and wines, and led by a dashing westerner so fully packed in the frontal power-zone that it is said his single-humped dromedary looked, to the untrained eye, like a double.
There could be no doubt about it: “Schlong-out Sam” had arrived in town to show the kid how it really should be done.
An’ ah thank the veiled ladeez in the harem know exactly what ah’m a-talkin’ bout. b
your ever lovin’ Sam Snort Esq.