John Mayer on his sexual urges: ‘Sort of like a white supremacist’

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Some smart Hollywood publicist could make a lot of money by giving guitarist-heartthrob John Mayer one piece of very simple advice: Put a sock in it. As in: If you stop giving embarrassing interviews, maybe you’ll stop embarrassing yourself. The Playboy Interview has become so dreary and old-fashioned that even Playboy readers barely read it anymore, but everyone is talking about the new March issue’s conversation with Mayer (easily searchable online), who is such a walking gaffe machine that he makes Joe Biden look like Tom Hanks.

You have to give Mayer credit. When asked early on, ‘What if you were to Google the phrase, ‘John Mayer is a douche bag,’’ he didn’t try to dissemble at all, simply replying: ‘You’d get a lot of hits.’

Unfortunately, the interview didn’t end there. Playboy’s Rob Tannenbaum (who gets my props for not shying away from asking all the right questions) then asked Mayer, or shall we say, noted that ‘you seem very fond of pornography.’

Instead of clamming up, Mayer breezily replied: ‘When I watch porn, if it’s not hot enough, I’ll make up backstories in my mind. My biggest dream is to write pornography.’ I don’t know about you, but I think that is what anyone would call sharing too much.

Still, if Mayer had just stopped there, he would’ve dodged a bullet. But what really got the guitarist in a heap of trouble, prompting a flurry of heated, unbelievably derisive Tweets (all too derisive for me to link to, since my newspaper doesn’t allow me to link to anything that features the kind of bad words George Carlin used to use 40 years ago), was Mayer’s effort to look cool by using the N-word.

In the course of praising Tom Cruise for making fun of himself in ‘Tropic Thunder,’ Mayer explained that it’s hard for a celebrity to be ‘very’ anything, especially very sincere or earnest. Or as he put it: ‘You have to show that you don’t take yourself seriously. Once you do that, people will say you’re cool ... It’s like I come on very strong. I am a very -- I’m just very. V-E-R-Y. And if you can’t handle very, then I’m a douche bag. But I think the world needs a little very. That’s why black people love me.’

Tannenbaum asks, innocently enough: ‘Because you’re very?’

And Mayer just goes right ahead and stabs himself with a hot poker, saying: ‘Someone asked me the other day, ‘What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?’ And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a [n-word] pass ... But I said, ‘I can’t really have a hood pass. I’ve never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, ‘We’re full’.... Not to say that my struggle is like the collective struggle of black America. But maybe my struggle is similar to one black dude’s.’

Tannenbaum mused: ‘Do black women throw themselves at you?’ And just in case he wasn’t already in enough trouble already, Mayer actually answered the question by saying: ‘I don’t think I open myself to it. My [penis] is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a [expletive] David Duke [penis].’

It actually gets even worse, if you can believe it, with Mayer fantasizing about which African American actresses he finds especially hot. But you’ll have to go to Playboy and read all the rest for yourself (plenty of intimate details about his relationship with Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Aniston, etc.)

Suffice to say that we’ve started the countdown for when Mayer surfaces on Oprah, trying to explain what he really meant to say and how much respect he has for black women and the collective struggle of black America. Not to mention how, now that he’s thought it through a bit, he’s probably given up on his dream to write pornography for a living as well. All I can say is that if Mayer can say that many dumb things in that little time, then he’s surely qualified to run for public office.