All Apologies

Joe Queenan once set up a small website to apologise to all those people he'd been unnecessarily mean to. It was mostly just a chance to replay all the really mean things he'd said about some celebrities or other and keep them all in one, handy place. Unfortunately it's not there anymore and I can't find a copy anywhere, but as a non-apology masquerading as an apology it was one of the funniest. I attempted a similar trick myself when I'd spent a previous night thinking up ways a holidaying American's girlfriend could be cuckolding him and then apologised the next day for being harsh eg. "You know when I said she was probably on all-fours right now being taken from behind by some muscly black guy with a cock the size of a baby's arm holding an apple. Yeah? Well I'm sorry I said that". Sadly in his apology to Keefer Sutherland in The Guardian Queenan doesn't take this approach, although he does take a side-swipe at Bridget Fonda:

Though I stand by my criticism of his early films, which were putrid, there is no doubt that I allowed my hatred of nepotism to blind me to the potential Sutherland clearly possessed. I still doubt that Sutherland would have succeeded had he not been Donald Sutherland's son. This does not alter the fact that he has succeeded. This is a lot more than you can say of Bridget Fonda.

A couple of non-apologies do slip in, though, Anthony Quinn, film critic for The Independent, is sorry he didn't make it clearer that Life Is Beautiful stinks and Jim Shelley, TV critic for the Mirror is sorry he wasn't harsher on Lindsey Corkhill.