For us, the distinction is clear: There are drunks who are badass, like Shane McGowan, or Jimi Hendrix, or Richard Burton, fearless drinkers who inspire not pity in their inebriation but sheer intimidation. Fully fitshaced, they could still send us running, and for that, we raise our glass. Then there's the rest, the ones who have us calling their mom in the middle of the night to put a coat on over her nightie and come pick them up in her sedan, because they're passed out pantsless on our lawn. Again.

The All-Time Worst Celebrity Drunks


10. Liza Minnelli

We'll give her this: After watching Liza with a Z on this 2006 Larry King Live interview -- as she chortles at a caller's claim that he's a musical theater major and stumbles over sentence construction 101 (admittedly, the phrase "retarded children" is challenging even for the sober) -- we kind of want to take her on a piano-bar crawl of the Castro. Because at the very least, she looks to be having a ball, and what with having Judy Garland as a mom and surviving the dark David Gest years, we'd need a drink, too. And yet, as we wipe the spittle from her crazy-cackle off both our face and the camera lens, we're left thinking that maybe we don't need that nightcap after all.

9. George W. Bush

As Bush himself can be heard saying in the above video, only in America. Admittedly, this one's pathetic only in hindsight -- sad, dejected, gunmetal-in-mouth hindsight. Because who hasn't hit the Champagne fountain a little too hard at a WASP wedding and felt like the king of the world until video evidence emerged to the contrary? This bland footage (with its now-recognizable deer-in-headlights look and speech patterns) wouldn't mean a thing if the guy was one of your brother's Bear Stearns buddies, the good-time Charlie you can depend on to throw the bachelor party and then show up churchside the next day -- on zero sleep, and reeking of lapdance -- before cinching his club tie 'round his noggin at the reception and rocking air guitar to "Sweet Home Alabama."

8. James Brown

James Brown grew up in a Georgia brothel, fathered five illegitimate kids (that we know of), fined his bandmates $5 for hitting bum notes, did time (more than once), got hauled downtown for smacking his third wife around, and probably shoved more junk into his veins and nose than the rest of this list combined. All that would be fine -- grand, even, in the tradition of troubled geniuses -- but this clip of Brown from "Sonya Live" just makes us wince. There may also be drugs involved here, but we know liquid courage when we see it. Brown blurts out lyrics Tourette's style, pinpoints reasons for his success with the ladies ("I look good, I smell good, I feel good, I make love good") and name-drops the Pope, all while attempting -- with mitigated success -- to focus on the camera through what look like soldering goggles.

7. Anna Nicole Smith

Now that she's gone off to that great big rehab in the sky, Smith is a cautionary tale, especially in this era of Pussycat Dolls and Hef's "girls" getting TV contracts. We're all for ladies showing off their assets -- be they store-bought or God-given -- but if you're going to take a Porsche out on the road, you better have both hands on the wheel, or else. Yet drunk, half-naked Barbies woo-hooing out of limo sunroofs are all the rage these days, and in this clip from the 32nd American Music Awards, A.N. embodies the category to a T. If hot, insecure cheerleaders didn't constantly strap themselves into tiny Lycra dresses and proceed to get wa-haasted and see what happens, the world (and the Fox News crawl) would be a different -- far more lethargic -- place.

6. Danny DeVito

At this point, in 2007, Danny DeVito is known for four things: His first career as an actor (starting out with "Taxi"), his second career as a producer (of everything from "Pulp Fiction" to "Garden State"), and sleeping with "Cheers" wiseass Rhea Pearlman (they've been married forever, yet how come no-one ever name-checks their union as proof that Hollywood marriages can last?). Finally, and most recently, DeVito is known for springboarding off an all-night limoncello bender with George Clooney straight to the set of "The View," and bringing the party with him. Still hammered and proud of it, DeVito hopped up into the chair and started trashing the president, his little feet barely touching the ground.

5. Amy Winehouse

This time last year most Americans couldn't pick her out of a lineup, but now Amy Winehouse is a household name, as much for her sizeable raw talent as for canceling gigs, doing shots with hookers in hotel rooms and mauling her Pete Doherty-lite hubby. It's refreshing, really, a throwback to a time when talent was trumped by self-destruction (see Joplin, Janis or Garland, Judy). But all of that fades as soon as you press play on this British TV clip of Winehouse duetting on "Beat It" (yes, that "Beat It") with Charlotte Church (yes, that Charlotte Church). Knowing what an incredible instrument her voice really is makes it that much harder to hear Winehouse reach for notes that aren't all that high and fall miserably short. And then there's the manic hand-flailing. And the eerie quiet, as the entire world holds its breath to see how soon she'll run out the clock and we all have to go back to pretending Beyoncé is the greatest singer of the '00s.

4. Cybill Shepherd

When Cybill Shepherd swapped barbs and then spit with Bruce Willis on "Moonlighting," she was fabulous. She was fabulous before then, too, in "The Last Picture Show" and "Taxi Driver" and "The Heartbreak Kid," and while we're loathe to use that term in conjunction with her '90s sitcom "Cybill!," at least she didn't leave TV land and content herself with marrying Danny DeVito. But once she started in with the cabaret singing, and playing Martha Stewart in TV movies, and her memoir "Cybill Disobedience," she started to bear the telltale signs of raiding life's minibar a little too often. The nadir came when Shepherd guested on a British morning show, looking like a horse that'd been ridden hard in a rainstorm and put away wet.

3. Ben Affleck

Sure, Affleck may be all respectable now that he's snagged America's sweetheart and become a daddy and his gritty directorial debut "Gone Baby Gone" has critics falling over themselves crying Oscar. But in this Quebecois TV segment from the "Jersey Girl" press tour, a bombed Affleck mauls interviewer Anne-Marie Losique, croons dirty nothings into her hair his best French accent ("Zese breasts are very firm! Soos-peesh-ously firm!"), and mimics someone afflicted with cerebral palsy. And those are just the highlights -- the tape's more than five minutes long. We have to wonder: Does Jennifer Garner not know about the internet?

2. David Hasselhoff

By now, you know the details: Hoff asks his daughter to videotape him next time he gets that drunk, so she does, and it hits the Internet, and the next time you see your landlord he's wearing that "Don't Hassel the Hoff!" T-shirt. It can't be easy being an aging punchline in America, known only for your prodigious chest fur, your talking car and your unflagging German fanbase. So maybe you don't handle it all that well, and you buy a hip flask, and you start losing it a little (like, say, openly weeping during the "American Idol" final). But sitting shirtless on a bathroom floor in Las Vegas and trying to eat a burger -- but repeatedly missing your mouth -- while your teenage daughter begs you to quit the sauce? Damn.

1. Orson Welles

Rosebud is far, far away in this '70s era clip from the set of a commercial that Orson Welles filmed for Paul Masson Champagne. Glassy-eyed and slumped in his seat -- almost dozing off, his obese corpse-to-be seemingly propped up, Muppet-like, with invisible wires -- the man who defined a century of cinema looks like he just wants to crawl back to bed, possibly with a(nother) case of the very product he's pushing and a bucket of chicken. Successive takes serve only to wend Welles deeper into his stupor, with repetitions of his opening line ("Mmaahaaah, the French!") getting more labored and hard to watch. Apparently, this is what happens when you peak at 25 years old.

E. Bougerol knows when to say when. What? Well, what the hell do YOU know? I'm not intoxicacated -- YOU'RE intoxitoxitoxicate-- You think you're so great, but you're not. Shut up!