In honor of tiny, mighty Butler University, whose basketball team’s improbable march to the national championship finally ended at the buzzer last night, we submit a dozen other butlers known for serving up good times.
12. AskJeeves.com: When we thought of this peculiar search engine, we had to re-visit the site just to be sure it still exists. It does! So we asked it “Who is the best butler?” The first hit: a blog post entitled “Gerard Butler Says Jennifer Aniston Has The Best Legs In Hollywood.” Useful as always.
11. Barkley from Modern Family: Barkley the dog butler (“He’s a dog and a butler. I mean, who couldn’t love him?”) is a kitschy souvenir from Jay’s trip to Vegas — and Jay’s wife, Gloria, couldn’t be more put out (“This is not art. This is an unholy mix between man and beast.”). While Jay’s obsession with the dog butler grows (he’s especially a fan of the canine’s monocle), Gloria begins to resent all the attention Barkley’s getting. Hilarity ensues.
10. Win Butler: The Arcade Fire frontman deserves a nod on this list, but if he were an actual butler we would probably fire his ass for taking his sweet time with the new AF record. Any day now, man!
9. Fonzworth Bentley: Style maven, one-time butler and—at least in this video—tuxedo-clad artist, the man known as “the penguin” parlayed his role as Diddy’s manservant into work as an umbrella designer.
5. Kevin Butler: This weekend, we want you to go find a local football field with goalposts. I want you to try to kick the ball 20 yards through the uprights. It’ll give you an appreciation for what field goal kickers do. And then drop back 40 more yards and get a since of what University of Georgia kicker Kevin Butler accomplished to beat Clemson in the waning moments of that famous 1984 game. Only Larry Munson’s call (“We’ll try to kick one 100,000 miles”) could possibly do it justice. After college, Butler went on to play for a team called the Chicago Bears. His son Drew punts for Georgia now.
3. William Butler Yeats: Statesman, playwright and nihilist-poet, the inimitable Irish writer William Butler Yeats was the embodiment of The Smiths’ aesthetic long before that plaintive namecheck left Morrissey’s lips. Yeats’ infamous preoccupation with façades (emotional and otherwise) became the soapbox upon which modern purveyors of affectation and pretense ply their trade—tread softly, because you tread on their dreams!
Best verses:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—from “The Second Coming” (1920)
2. Benson: The Tates and the Campbells could drive anyone crazy, but Benson’s sarcasm was his armor against the insanity on Soap in the late ’70s and on Robert Guillaume’s own show into the ’80s.