Timothee Chalamet is committed to being silly and having fun with Marty Supreme promotion

Dear Gossips,

On Monday, Lainey wrote about Timothee Chalamet skipping the Governors Awards so that he could stunt on Insta for Marty Supreme. I didn’t think I could enjoy Timmy Ping Pong any more than I already was, but then…well…he started fruitionizing.

That wild discussion about a blimp? They did it. The blimp WAS a good idea!

You know what makes it for me? The crows. They’re agreeing! And it doesn’t stop there, because there is also the Wheaties Box!

If you told me Tim Robinson and/or Zach Kanin was involved with this, I would absolutely believe it, because what Timmy Ping Pong is doing with this meta ad campaign is simultaneously parodying your weirdest co-worker AND using the kind of “oddball character dying on the stupidest hill imaginable” humor that fuels Robinson’s and Kanin’s work on I Think You Should Leave. At this point, I am checking live views of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower daily to see if they’ve been “activated” yet.

Timmy Ping Pong can’t stop, won’t stop, as last night he showed up to a Marty Supreme pop-up with an army of ball-heads, and wearing a pink hoodie branded with the three orange stars that are now instantly identifiable with this film. The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield recently pondered if indie distributors have forgotten how to market their films—which is specifically about awards season and small films but also goes for blockbusters, see also: The Running Man—but Chalamet and the folks at A24 are capturing the zeitgeist in a way that IS still possible. It hasn’t reached Barbie levels yet, but they’ve still got a few weeks to work.

Everyone says monoculture is dead until someone does something fun and we all embrace it. Make a good Barbie movie, steal the crown jewels, get an orange blimp—if it’s FUN, people embrace it en masse. Maybe the problem isn’t entirely that our fractured media landscape has killed the monoculture, maybe it’s a little bit that contemporary life is not fun. Social problems that have been compounding for decades, trickle down economics that didn’t trickle down, a political landscape so dire nothing gets done—these aren’t new problems. What IS new is a lack of centralized entertainment to take our minds off it, and I no longer believe that it is entirely down to fractured media.

I think it’s also a little bit that the dumb stuff that doesn’t matter isn’t fun anymore, and we can debate why that is—some combination of technology, grind culture/hustle mindset, and social media making everyone paranoid about looking stupid—but we’re in a drought of dumb stuff.

But the minute something fun comes along, no matter how stupid, people rush to embrace it.

You know why Timmy Ping Pong is fun? Because it’s clear Timothee Chalamet is having fun himself. Fun is contagious. If one person is having fun, other people want to have fun, too. Just think about how many press tours involve celebrities complaining and/or acting like being a movie star is such a burden, and then the press tour isn’t fun, and everyone tunes out. It’s why people like chicken interviews and puppy interviews and stunts—they’re FUN. And the most popular editions of those things involve stars having fun doing them. A huge part of Jonathan Bailey’s appeal is just that he is fun!

Have fun today, even if it’s stupid, even if you feel silly, because after the silliness comes the fun. Timothee Chalamet is committed to being silly. Let’s be silly with him, and invite a little fun into our lives, too.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah