inside jokes

SUCK IT: The Inside Jokes of Cate Blanchett and Julia Roberts

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With her win for Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett joined the exclusive ranks of two-time Oscar winners. But evidently she was already a member of an even more exclusive club: the club of people who have inside jokes with Julia Roberts. She said in her acceptance speech:

Amy Adams, everything you do but your performance in American Hustle blew my mind. Meryl, what can I say? Sandra I could have watched that performance until the end of time … and I sort of felt like I had. Julia, hashtag suck it, you know what I mean. And Judi Dench, I mean what a career …

Julia, hashtag suck it: This random spattering of words has all the classic elements of a middle-school-level inside joke. It’s an unorthodox sentence structure. It’s slightly, self-consciously raunchy. And mostly, it implies that its meaning is something that Cate and Julia, and only Cate and Julia, will fully comprehend. You know what I mean.

It even has a mysterious origin story: the true centerpiece of an inside joke, especially one predicated on trying to get other people to care about it. When asked by reporters — the people who just want to know what happened, guys? Guys, what’s so funny? Why is everyone laughing? — Blanchett remained “cryptic.” This is from the Hollywood Reporter:

It happened in the bar with Ms. Roberts. And that’s all I’m prepared to say.

With that, the rest of us can go suck it.

Inside Jokes of Cate Blanchett and Julia Roberts