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Fake character takes Hollywood by storm

By Roscoe Arbuckle
Entertainment Editor

LOS ANGELES, California – From Malibu to Morton's, all Hollywood is buzzing about the cleverest fake character to hit the film industry in years. "This guy just reeks b.o. [Is this a compliment? – Copy Ed.][He means box office, you twit. – Ed.]," exclaimed Twentieth Century Fox co-honcho Tom Rothman.

Of course, they're talking about the supposed alien who comes to the United States and offends everyone with his queer customs and rude behavior, but  nonetheless achieves fame and fortune.  The hilarious character's name?   You've probably guessed it by now: "Tom Cruise."

"Even the name is a side-splitter," Rothman commented.  "I mean, who would believe a real character would have a name that properly belongs to a love-boat gigolo?"

For years, the "Tom Cruise" character has amused and bemused the film community with his madcap antics. The ever-quotable crazy man has produced reams of press with his palpably fake marriage to a clueless starlet and his endless shilling for a bizarre fake "religion."

His edgy humor was memorably on display when he attacked another celebrity for treating her post-partum depression with a course of medically-approved drug therapy. "Some say he went too far in attacking Brooke Shields, but I say if your audience doesn't think you've gone too far, you haven't gone far enough," said admirer and fellow comedian Carrot Top.

Recently, the Spy has learned that "Tom Cruise" is in fact Roland Derrida, a graduate of Paris's elite Ecole Nationale Superieure in Paris. Derrida, who for many years was a star at the renowned Comedie Francaise, refuses to appear in public except as his obviously deranged "Tom Cruise" character.

Sources close to Derrida, however, tell the Spy that, contrary to "Tom Cruise's" manic personality, Derrida is a quiet, thoughtful Parisian who enjoys writing book reviews for obscure French quarterlies and is reputed to be a first-class cellist to boot. While the "Tom Cruise" character teases Hollywood with the prospect of a "marriage" to a woman who can barely write her own name, Derrida has been happily married for almost two decades to a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris IX named Madeline.

Derrida has nursed the "Tom Cruise" character for years, from its origins as a giggly high-school student through a series of improbable action-hero roles in which he was coupled with woman many inches taller to hilarious effect, to a recent "feud" with a superannuated film tycoon.  "I can't wait to find out what project 'Tom Cruise' will do next.  I'd certainly like to be a part of it," enthused Rothman.

Derrida's grounding in French philosophy has undoubtedly helped him create the bizarre science-fiction based religion that "Tom Cruise" loudly espouses. "I love the stuff about all human suffering deriving from a Thetan alien invasion.  And the bit about the evil of psychiatry and drugs is pure comic genius," gushed aging box-office poison Robin Williams, widely regarded in the film community as an authority on the subjects of comedy and drugs.

However, no one knows where Derrida got the inspiration for the recent "Tom Cruise" storyline involving the production of a baby supposedly by a woman that "Tom Cruise" never laid a glove on.

Some fear that the recent "birth" of "Tom Cruise's" "child" may have been pushing the joke one step too far. "Sure, it's funny, but what's going to happen to the child?" asked crepy-necked Hollywood hanger-on Nora Ephron. Unconfirmed reports state that the child, improbably denominated "Suri," will be donated to Madonna in a ceremony timed to coincide with the opening of "Tom's" next movie. Other Tinseltown insiders assert that baby "Suri" will soon be returned to her orphanage back in her native Kazakhstan.