Culture

This Whole Shia LaBeouf Plagiarised Apologies Thing Might Be The Best Saga Of The Year So Far

He's now apologising for plagiarising his apology to plagiarising via skywriting, if that makes sense.

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Remember midnight that other evening when the fireworks were glistening in your tipsy eyes and you had your arm around your special someone and you thought to yourself, “Argh, how is 2014 going to top last year?” Well, here’s a news story involving Shia LaBeouf being a total dick, so, you know, mission accomplished, I guess?

Last month, the actor — who’ll soon be seen doing a whole lotta unsimulated fucking in Lars Von Trier’s upcoming family flick, Nymphomaniac — was forced into issuing a public apology after the internet noticed some striking similarities between his debut short film, Howard Cantour, and comics author Daniel Clowes’s 2008 charity comic, Justin M. Damiano.

Proving the often prophetic words of Morrissey, the internet soon found out that LaBeouf’s apology was actually plagiarised from an old Yahoo Answers page. “Ha, good one,” we all laughed, and then went back to drinking beer. Little did we know that this was just the beginning of an ongoing saga that would soon consume our attention throughout the new year new year’s extremely tedious first one-and-a-half days.

Earlier this week, LaBeouf issued a new apology for plagiarising his apology to plagiarising Dan Clowes by again plagiarising an old apology. Thrice.

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According to internet sleuths, the first apology was swiped from UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s apology about university tuition fees from 2012. The second apology was lifted from Jade Goody’s apology for being racist on the UK’s Celebrity Big Brother back in 2010. And the third is a word-for-word copy (hashtags and all) of an apology tweeted out by syphilitic porn star Mr. Marcus in 2012 for hiding his affliction.

Overnight, LaBeouf continued this witty game, with a new string of EXTREMELY SINCERE apologies to poor Daniel Clowes, who’s probably sitting at home in a dark room and wondering what the hell’s going on with his life at the moment, he just wants to draw and listen to ’30s blues records, for chrissakes:

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And then he commissioned some pilot to poop out a sky-written message over Los Angeles that read, “I am sorry Daniel Clowes”.

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Oh man, 2014 is going to be so exciting, I can feel it.