Charlie Sheen: Who needs ‘Two and a Half Men’ when you have Twitter?

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Charlie Sheen got his Twitter account up and running Tuesday. Barely 24 hours later, if you believe this story in the Hollywood Reporter, he has nearly 1 million followers. Supposedly this is going to allow Sheen to have a more direct conversation with his fans, although judging from the snippets of his big-time media interviews that I’ve seen, it seems as if Sheen is communicating with his fans just fine. Now he’s acting just as odd and disoriented as he could have acted if he were alone in his mansion -- well, as alone as you can be when you’re shacked up with a harum of young lovelies -- tweeting to his heart’s content.

I know those of us in the media are supposed to frown at the notion of celebrities communicating with their fans without having to sit down and allow us to ask the questions. It’s sort of like cutting out the middle man. But cutting out the middle man cuts both ways, since the material tweeted by the kind of celebrities you’d want to follow -- the unhinged ones -- doesn’t seem to have been run past any personal publicists.

That would certainly be true of Sheen, who in one of his first efforts tweeted: ‘Just got invited to do the Nancy Grace show. I’d rather go on a long road trip with Chuck Lorre in a ’75 Pacer.’ What’s especially great about that tweet is that it sounds uncannily like one of the tweets from a young prankster who’s been posing as a Twitter-happy Mel Gibson (you can follow him here). The fake Mel just weighed in on the whole Sheen affair, tweeting: ‘The way I feel about Charlie Sheen right now is the same thing aspiring painters experience gazing upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.’ In a word: He’s awestruck. And aren’t we all?

I guess crazy guys are all, at their core, kindred spirits. When I heard a news clip last night about some nut claiming that Barack Obama had grown up in Kenya, which was why he thought differently about the Mau-Mau revolt than most people, it sounded so delusional that it took a lot of convincing before I could believe that the quote came from Mike Huckabee, not Charlie Sheen. To prove just how eerily similar some crazy guys are, Richard Adams at the Guardian dreamed up this hilarious quiz, titled: ‘Charlie Sheen vs. Muammar Gaddafi: Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ He gives readers 10 outlandish statements, challenging us to figure out whether they were uttered by Sheen or the Libyan. Some of them are pretty tough. After all, both men have been indulging in some pretty ditzily soaring rhetoric, so can you really figure out who actually might have said: ‘Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body’?

I took the test and got 7 out of 10 right. Feel free to see if you can do better.

--Patrick Goldstein