Etta James is so multitalented – she’s a singer, former heroin addict, compulsive eater – and she’s funny, too.

No, really. Etta James is funny. She is. She IS. Like, remember when Etta James launched into a spectacularly bitter diatribe about how much she hated Beyonce for performing at President Obama’s inauguration ball instead of her? Turn out that Etta James was just telling a hilarious – if freakishly convincing – joke. Hilarious!

It just goes to show what a petty, massively untalented washed-up hasbeen that puke-stinking old hag Etta James is, doesn’t it? And Beyonce. And you. Only joking! Hey, we’re catching on!

Oh darnit. We were all set to archive this week away as Celebrity Hate Week, what with Duff/ Dunaway and King/ Meyer and Bale/ underling and Cyrus/ entire population of Asia, but now we won’t be able to. And it’s all Etta James’ fault.

You see, when Etta James started ranting about Beyonce at a concert last week, about how furious she was that Beyonce had hijacked her song to perform at the presidential inauguration ball last month, it meant we’d seen five bewildering acts of celebrity provocation in a week, which is a record. But Etta James had to go and bloody spoil it all, didn’t she.

You see, when Etta James stood on stage in Seattle last week and said that she couldn’t stand Beyonce and that Beyonce was going to get her ass whupped for stealing her song, she was just joking. Now, admittedly it wasn’t a traditional ha-ha joke – more a character piece about a woman so gnarled and vinegary that everything she says sounds like a screeching torrent of hatred – but we’ll have to take her word for it. Here’s Gigwise with Etta’s take on it all:

“I didn’t really mean anything,” James told the New York Daily News. “Even as a little child, I’ve always had that comedian kind of attitude. … That’s probably what went into it.” James added that her comments had not come “from a vicious place”, and that she had been spurred on by the audience. “Nobody was getting mad at me in Seattle. They were all laughing, and it was funny,” she said.

Well, alright, we suppose we can’t really fault Etta James’ explanation here – they were all laughing at her in Seattle. Again, it wasn’t so much of a side-splitting joyous laugh – more of the laugh that people tend to do when they’re on a bus and a nutter gets on and starts fingering a knife and babbling to himself and you nervously laugh along because you think it’ll stop you getting violently stabbed in the neck – but it does technically still count as laughter.

Still, you have to admire Beyonce for gracefully rising above all of the perculiar little outbursts that Etta James keeps lobbing at her. Maybe it’s just as well – imagine how annoyed she’s going to be in the year 2038 when some booby young pup is picked to sing Bootylicious at the presidential inauguration ball instead of her. Livid, we’d expect.

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