Jeremy Irons tries to sound smart without a script written by someone smarter than he is

As a teenager Jeremy Irons learned to train his voice so he could fake sounding sophisticated. It’s a convincing act as long as he sticks to saying words written by screenwriters a lot less ignorant than he is. With his usual impressive diction, the Oscar-winning actor said today he worries that marriage equality will lead to father-son marriages and then a lot more somber nonsense dribbled out of his dumb mouth:

“Could a father not marry his son?” Irons asked HuffPost Live host Josh Zepps. Irons argued that “it’s not incest between men” because “incest is there to protect us from inbreeding, but men don’t breed,” and wondered whether same-sex marriage might allow fathers to pass on their estates to their sons without being taxed.

“It seems to me that now they’re fighting for the name,” Irons said of advocates for same-sex marriage as opposed to civil unions. “I worry that it means somehow we debase, or we change, what marriage is. I just worry about that.”

Realizing how crude this might sound, Mr Irons made it all better with this clarification:

“Living with another animal, whether it be a husband or a dog, is great,” he said. “It’s lovely to have someone to love.”

UPDATE: Finally, a clip that will embed properly: