There’s no polite way to ask this, so we’re just going to come out and demand to know: did John Oliver pay $7k for Russell Crowe’s jockstrap?
To back up slightly: last night Crowe held his ‘The Art of Divorce’ auction at Carriageworks in Redfern, in which he offloaded pieces of art, musical instruments and, significantly, memorabilia from his many films. There were his boots from Romper Stomper, his chariot from Gladiator and – amazingly – his jockstrap from Cinderalla Man.
So why do we think that Oliver might have been that winning bid? Well, there are two reasons.
First up, in July last year he revealed that the show had spent US$13,700 buying five wax models of presidents – specifically, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, William Henry Harrison and Warren G. Harding – after the closure of the Hall of Presidents and First Ladies Museum in Gettysburg. So he has form for buying insane garbage.
Learning about presidents is fun!
And then on March 18th episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver interrupted an admittedly fairly chilling piece on the explicit anti-LGBTIQ agenda of vice president Mike Pence to refer to Crowe’s auction and specifically singled the jockstrap out.
“You can buy items such as the leather jockstrap used during the filming of Cinderella Man,” he enthusiastically revealed. “Will we be stupid enough to bid on that? I don’t know. Why don’t you ask one of our five wax presidents?”
What we do know about the winning bid was that it was made over the phone and that it was for $7000, which is $US5,380. Which seems like a bargain, since that’s about for Carter and Clinton combined.
Presumably we’ll find out shortly on Last Week Tonight – say, what sort of shipping time does a standard jockstrap take from Sydney to New York these days?