It’s obvious that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie pick their childrens’ names via a complex system of shuffled Scrabble tiles, darts and fevered Glossolalia.

Although it has plus sides – like the way that it gives Brad and Angelina a bit more of the attention that they so obviously crave – giving their children a variety of stupid names was always going to come back and kick Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie up the bum. And now it has.

You see, Brad Pitt says that Shiloh Nouvel – the oldest biological Jolie-Pitt – has decided that Shiloh is a stupid name for a child. So now she’ll only answer to the name John. We can only pray that this trend ends now – while John is still a funny name because of the gender issue, all it’ll take is for Pax Thien to decide he wants to be called Alan and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will be laughed out of the Hollywood elite.

You’d think that, having been married to one crazed self-publicist and then fathering the children of another, Brad Pitt would be a little better at promoting movies. But recent events have shown he has so much to learn.

Where Angelina Jolie markets movies by arming her children ahead of what we can only assume to be a biological vs adopted West Side Story-style offspring gangfight, and Jennifer Aniston markets movies by tearing open old wounds and forcing everyone to stare at them, Brad Pitt’s lagging a little bit.

While we can’t say we blame him – if we were asked to try and make Troy attractive to people we’d probably end up throwing ourselves under a train – at least Brad Pitt is slowly starting to make a bit of an effort. He might not share the same talent for controversy-stoking as any of the women in his life, but when pushed he can at least fall back on the old adorable kid angle when needed.

Or, to be more accurate, the old gender-confused, ashamed-of-their-own-name kid angle, which is what he did on Oprah recently to help promote The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. As Fox reports, Brad Pitt’s two-year-old daughter Shiloh will only respond to the name ‘John’:

“She only wants to be called John. John or Peter. So it’s a Peter Pan thing,” Pitt says. “So we’ve got to call her John. ‘Shi, do you want …’ – ‘John. I’m John.’ And then I’ll say, ‘John, would you like some orange juice?’ And she goes, ‘No!’ So, you know, it’s just that kind of stuff that’s cute to parents, and it’s probably really obnoxious to other people.”

Now we know that seems like a disarmingly sweet tale for Brad Pitt to tell about his child but, trust us, it has a much darker subtext. What Brad Pitt is effectively saying is that because Shiloh Nouvel deliberately chose to rebel against the ridiculous name that he and Angelina Jolie carefully picked out for her, he’s going to punish her by appearing on a big TV show and mocking her for wanting to be a man, in a clip that will no doubt be endlessly replayed throughout Shiloh Nouvel’s adolescence, much to her horror.

The message to the other Jolie-Pitt kids is clear – you do not mess with your chosen names ever. Zahara, if you ever decide you’d rather be called Louise then Brad Pitt will go on as many TV shows as he can to tell the world about the time he caught you trying to push Lego up your bottom. And Maddox, you’d better make sure your name stays the same, because Angelina Jolie doesn’t want to go on Larry King to reveal your hobby of tucking your penis between your legs and singing a song about being a pretty princess. She doesn’t want to, but she will.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!