Mel Gibson may be a mad racist — but he’s a genius

You’ve got to hand it to Mel Gibson. When it comes to potentially career-ending outbursts of vile bigotry, there really is nobody better. As somebody posted on Twitter this week (there is increasingly little point in even trying to formulate this stuff yourself), ‘You’re a pretty hard-core ass when drunkenly yelling about Jews running banks and calling a lady cop “sugar tits” is your cute, lesser rant’.

We’ll come to that one in a moment. This time around, the star of many of my favourite films was taped, allegedly, having a go at his then girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. Go out dressed like that, he basically said, and you are liable to ‘get raped by a pack of niggers’.

Which, do you reckon, is the most offensive bit? The n-word made the headlines, and ‘raped’ isn’t great either, in context. For my money, though, it’s the rather more subtle ‘pack’ bit that does a lot of the work, racistly speaking.