George Clooney Recounts His Legendary Prank On His Former Roommate, Richard Kind

Celebrity pranks are a genre unto themselves, and perhaps no one is better known for them than George Clooney, who once put a “F*ck the Police” bumper sticker on Brad Pitt’s car knowing that it would get him pulled over.

There is one Clooney prank, however, that stands above the rest, and while Clooney has shared this story multiple times over the years, he has rarely had the opportunity to do so outside of the confines of a late-night talk show, where he’s given 7 minutes to speak without using profanities while also promoting a new project. This week on the Smartless podcast, however, Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes landed Clooney as a guest. This is a huge deal because Clooney is very selective about who he will speak to in the media, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard Clooney do a full-length podcast.

It was a good episode, but his retelling of the prank he pulled on his former roommate, Richard Kind, makes the episode a must-listen. I’m going to recount the tale here, but it won’t do justice to Clooney’s retelling, complete with his impeccable Richard Kind impression. Listen to that here, starting at the 19-minute mark in the podcast.

As Clooney tells it, when he was living with Kind, he was mostly auditioning, so he had a lot of free time, so much so that he’d watch the East Coast feed of Jeopardy every day and then rewatch it again on the West Coast and answer all the questions right to impress Kind, who had no idea that he’d already watched.

In any event, Richard Kind also had “this little tiny kitten” that Kind would “sleep with on his chest, and he called it kitty.” Because Clooney wanted to be a good friend and roommate, and because he had nothing better to do, he decided to clean up the kitten’s litter box one day. The litter box was next to the toilet, so he scooped up the cat poop and flushed it while Kind was out working.

When Kind comes home, he goes to the bathroom, comes out, and he says, “My little kitty. He hasn’t taken a sh-t in, I think, three days.” Clooney doesn’t say anything to this. He doesn’t know why — he just decides not to. Meanwhile, over the next several days, Clooney continues to clean up the cat poop and flush it down the toilet.

“And then he takes the cat to the vet, and they give him this kitty Metamucil. And so now this little kitty is sh-tting 15 times a day, and I am scooping it all up, because I have nothing else to do,” Clooney says.

Soon enough, Kind starts to freak out because, as far as he knows, his kitty hasn’t pooped in days. Clooney, however, keeps it up. “I have no idea why. It’s just funny,” Clooney says. “And then after a couple of weeks, the light bulb goes off, and I realize what I must do.

And this is when the story goes from funny to sublime.

“I must take a sh*t in the cat box,” Clooney laughs. And that is what he does. George Clooney, one of the most famous men in the world, squatted over a kitty litter box and took a dump in it.

“Now there is this moment,” Clooney continues, “when I’m squatted down over a cat box where I’m going, ‘Really? I mean, it’s funny. It’s good. But I’m not sure it’s how I want to be remembered.’”

It’s important to understand here that “the cat is like six-inches long. It’s a tiny cat.” As for Kind’s reaction to the human turd in his cat’s litter box?

“I’m watching Jeopardy and Richard comes home. We’re talking for a minute, and he goes to the bathroom. He’s in there for like a minute, and I don’t hear anything. Then, all of a sudden I hear, ‘OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD.’ And he comes running out, and he’s like, ‘You’re not going to believe this. You have to see this.’”

“And when I come in, I’m laughing so hard that tears are streaming down my eyes, and slowly … slowly he figures it out. He realizes that I have been shoveling the cat sh-t out for weeks, and he gets madder and madder and madder.”

“And then finally he says, ‘I understand humor! Defecation doesn’t make me laugh!’”

And that is the legendary story about George Clooney’s prank on his old roommate, Richard Kind.

Source: Smartless