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Which show will Trump cancel next?
It seemed Trump had finally dealt with domestic terrorist Jimmy Kimmel after his chat show was briefly cancelled, but now it’s back on air. So should we expect more censorship? Surely South Park is skating on thin ice by mocking the president and his allegedly inadequate penis? Maybe the president will throw a curveball and declare a nature show about squirrels to be a secret antifa recruitment operation? Or perhaps he will simply cut the niceties and just put Oprah Winfrey up on Showtrial (“Ratings like you’ve never seen before!”)?
Should we boycott Spotify?
First it was Neil Young and Joni Mitchell who removed their music from Spotify because they didn’t like sharing a platform with Joe Rogan’s podcast. Now Massive Attack have taken their tunes down from the streaming service in protest at founder Daniel Ek’s investment of half a billion pounds in a military AI company (I’m no expert on these things, but that sounds at least as bad as hosting the Joe Rogan Experience). So should artists still be hawking their wares on Spotify? More to the point, should we as consumers still be paying for Spotify? This line of debate becomes especially spicy if your host is using said streaming service for the evening’s background music, meaning you can accuse them in front of all their peers of being complicit in a future of facial-recognition drone attacks – always a great icebreaker.
It might be handy to know the names of the comedians who recently sold their souls – sorry – embarked on a humanitarian mission to spread the joy of standup across the globe, by agreeing to play at the Riyadh comedy festival. Many people were outraged that the likes of Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Louis CK, Kevin Hart, Jack Whitehall, Jessica Kirson, Aziz Ansari and Pete Davidson (among others) agreed to take the oil state’s money, although to be fair the arguments over whether they should have played the gig are actually complex to get into. On the one hand, Saudi Arabia is a state that jails people for parody tweets, dismembers journalists with bone saws, and frequently executes multiple people on the same day. But on the other hand, as Burr passionately argued, it also has a McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut and, hey, nobody beheaded him, OK?
Meet your new AI art overlords
Later this year sees the opening of Dataland – billed as the world’s first AI art museum – in Los Angeles. It comes off the back of the Velvet Sundown, the 70s-style rockers who went viral on Spotify earlier this year despite existing only in algorithmic form, and Tilly Norwood, recently unveiled as the world’s first AI actor. So what do your dinner party guests think? Could they really spot a Louvre masterpiece from an AI fake? Is there not a better use for galaxy-brained robots than playing bass guitar in a band that sound a bit like the Eagles? Should Norwood be in the next series of Celebrity Traitors? All of this also doubles as helpful practice for the future when all dinner parties will simply involve sitting alone and conversing with obsequious chatbots over a bottle of Huel.
How likely is a House of Dynamite scenario?
No dinner party is complete without a recap of just how close we all are to being turned into radioactive ash. And what better way to do that than turn to Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, which posits a scenario in which some rogue agent has launched a nuke at the US and they have a limited amount of time to respond. How realistic is the film? Is it as terrifying as Threads? (No.) And if this scenario actually happened in the real world, wouldn’t the US response just be Pete Hegseth blaming it all on woke? Oh, and also: does this particular dinner party have access to a lead-lined bunker?
Are you still team Taylor?
Maybe you haven’t had time to read all of the 732,643 think-pieces currently online (at time of going to press) regarding Swift’s latest album, The Life Of A Showgirl. But if you wanted to boil it all down to one red-hot issue then it’s probably the reigniting of a feud with Charli xcx on Actually Romantic, in which Swift accuses someone of calling her “boring Barbie” when they were high on coke, and wonders why the person in question is so obsessed with her. Said obsession clearly alludes to Charli’s song Sympathy Is a Knife, which was sort of about Swift but also more about Charli’s own insecurities as a young woman. However you view it, please steer clear from wading into discussing the song Wood, Taylor’s ode to her fiance’s penis that will definitely put you off the dinner aspect of this dinner party.
Erling Haaland: classical connoisseur
If a dinner party is particularly stilted, certain adults in the room may try to fill the awkward silences in the most desperate manner possible: football chat. You don’t have time to memorise the league position of every club in the pyramid, so this is where you effortlessly step in by plucking out a fascinating fact guaranteed to wow guests: did you happen to know, you will say, that Manchester City’s brutish number nine, Erling Haaland, is actually a surprisingly knowledgable classical music buff?
Take them through the full repertoire of a recent playlist he made – from well-thumbed classics, such as Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, to hushed pieces of Nordic noir, such as Ólafur Arnalds’s Near Light – and perhaps pontificate on how repeated exposure to Bach’s keyboard concertos is the only surefire way to score an early winner against Brentford.
Who should be in the next Celebrity Traitors?
With the exception of Haaland’s love of Vivaldi, these conversation starters have admittedly been rather downbeat, covering feuds, military AI, dismemberment, nuclear catastrophe and the mental visualisation of at least two penises we did not need before eating. So let’s lighten the mood by trying to guess who might be recruited for the next series of Celebrity Traitors: I’m thinking Tracey Emin, Lola Young, Chris Eubank, Miriam Margolyes, Nasty Nick, Meghan Markle, John Cleese and that guy who won’t cut his hair until Manchester United win five games in a row should make a decent show of it.
