Who Is This Amanda They Keep Talking About?

There are 150,000 Google connections between Amanda Bynes and Anderson Cooper's RidicuList. Why? Who is she? Who cares?

---

Anderson Cooper Rips Amanda Bynes Apart After Obama Tweet

Posted by Donovan Smolenyak on June 7, 2012 in Entertainment

On Wednesday, former child star Amanda Bynes pleaded not guilty (via her lawyer) for allegedly driving while intoxicated and side swiping a police car outside of a nightclub on April 6th. I only mention that her lawyer plead for Bynes, because she didn’t even show up to her court date. If convicted guilty, the actress could spend as many as up to six months in jail.

In an act of, what any reasonable person would call desperation, Bynes tweeted to the official Barack Obama handle on Tuesday attempting to vindicate herself from the aforementioned charges. “Hey Barack Obama . . . I don’t drink,” she wrote. “Please fire the cop who arrested me. I also don’t hit and run. The end.”

While millions of Twitter followers had their way via 140 characters of snide comments and sarcasm, Andersoon Cooper takes the cake by acknowledging the tweet on “The Ridiculist” CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360.

Cooper mocks, “She apparently used to be on Nickelodeon, and then was in the movie Hairspray.” While I understand that Anderson Cooper (however sexy) did not grow up in the 90’s, I would just like to take this paragraph to briefly defend the genius that was Amanda Bynes. After starting her comedy career on All That on Nickelodeon, she went on to get her own show, The Amanda Show (Amanda, please), and eventually moved on to get her often syndicated sitcom What I Like About You (co-starring Jennie Garth, who now has her own reality show Jennie Garth: A Little Bit Country on CMT). And fine, okay, her role in Hairspray wasn’t Oscar-worthy, but still: girl could make a dumb joke laughable. All that aside, her career, however, is not why she made The Ridiculist.

This was the birth of this week’s special segment: “Things More Important Than Amanda Bynes’ Tweets.” Cooper explains, “I know what you’re thinking. Basically, anything is more important than Amanda Bynes’ tweets… For example, we learned today that Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth are engaged. Now, on an ordinary day, Ms. Cyrus’ engagement would just be a standard celebrity item, but when compared to Amanda Bynes’ tweet, it is basically Watergate, the moon landing, and the Oscars all rolled into one.”

Cooper even went so far as to say that Kanye West’s “vulgar and random” tweets were more important, “at least he’s not tweeting the President to get him out of jail.” Ouch.

“Ms. Bynes, if you want to keep tweeting the President, that is certainly your right, but maybe you could even give him a call. Just be sure to leave him your number so that he can contact you on The Ridiculist,” Anderson concludes.

According to IMDB.com, Amanda Bynes has no upcoming jobs.