The other day, sitting in an ante chamber to hell, I picked up a copy of US Weekly and with a gleeful heart read several pitiable stories about the lives of the rich and famous. Tom and Nicole’s Irreconcilable Differences! The Movie that Wrecked Meg and Dennis’s Marriage! Matthew Perry’s Sudden Return to Rehab!

Matthew, personally, I'm surprised at you-this, after you'd told us you'd given up drinking, drugs, clubs and strip joints for good (“I’ve done it, it’s tired, it’s beat”). Didn't you say-only a couple of weeks ago (during my previous visit to the dentist)-“Now I like having those quiet nights at home”? And I, like a fool, believed you, dude. Of course, you didn’t say whose home. Shortly thereafter you crashed your green Porsche into some poor, unsuspecting person’s house in the Hollywood Hills.

In these stories there is always the insipid statement from the publicist who, like some inane, twittering bird on Prozac, sees everything: “Matthew has every intention of completing his treatment so he can continue his dream of entertaining people and making them laugh.” Black humor department, we assume.

These articles abide by the now well-proven People Principle which states that every celebrity story must contain some personal tragedy. This isn’t just the Schadenfreude of seeing the mighty get their comeuppance, it's the natural extension of the requisite Terrible Two’s quota that we require from our idols. It’s their job to behave badly. Wretched excess is their mandate (arrogance, self-indulgence, bad behavior, and insensitivity, their prerogative). They are obliged-poor things!-to act out all the scandalous behavior that we mortals are constrained to avoid. They are our surrogate bad boys and girls. Like action figures, we set them up to knock them down.

The pleasure in seeing our idols (well, somebody’s idols) fall off their pedestals for the very things we’ve goaded them to with sycophantic fawning, money, and fame is an ancient vice. You could say its current People-magazine phase started with Boccaccio, the fourteenth-century Italian author of The Decameron. His De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (The Fall of Famous Men) was a best-seller in Renaissance Italy. Detailing the vanity of human folly since Adam, Boccaccio believed that every great man had a fatal flaw that would eventually bring him down.

You might even take this a step further and say that Greek tragedy and the tragedies of Shakespeare are a form of weeping (while gloating) over the dreadful fates of Kings and Queens. Shocking New Revelations About King Oedipus’s Marriage and the Homicide He Tried To Conceal! The Sickening Details of Medea’s Family Life! As for Shakespeare’s fallen monarchs, they're just Late Medieval movie stars caught in the act. Richard III: There He Goes Again! The Macbeths’ Steamy Secret!

The grisly fates of famous people were so taken for granted in Ancient Greece that kings were ritually maimed at birth to avert the wrath of the gods (Oedipus got his name “swell-foot” from just such a mutilation). As if to say, gods, don't look at me, there's nothing to envy here, I'm just a poor club-footed wretch, I couldn't possibly mean anything to you. Why don’t you try the King of Corinth? He’s got a real bad case of hubris and needs taking down a peg or two. This is all nuttily expounded upon in Robert Graves’s novel, King Jesus.

Out of the banality and squalor of celebrity debris I did spy one item that gave me pause: “The Odd Couple: Jack Moves in With Marlon.” Does anyone else find something almost mythological in this arrangement? Here are Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, the two top cats in the movies, living in the same house-just like those saucy, out-of-control gods on Mount Olympus. These guys really are genuine cultural icons, mythic characters of such resonance that the goofy thought crosses my mind that perhaps they actually are gods (pretending to be actors).

What did happen to the Greek gods, anyway? Just consider all the things that Marlon and Jack have in common with the gods of Olympus: serial philandering, terminal bad behavior, self-delusion, abuse of power, epic chutzpah, and over-decorated dwellings.

Listen, I'm glad to hear you guys are bunkies but, Marlon, a word to the wise: be careful, be very careful. Get all the radios and hair dryers out of the bathroom. Are you getting my drift? Whenever you’re tempted to let down your guard, just remember what Jack said: “Marlon’s number one. When he goes, we’ll all move up a place.”