Nothing cheers me up like a public apology. In this slick, image-managed century, the public apology confirms that we are still human; that even the most successful of us are capable of the most extraordinary self-sabotage.

So far this year, we've had the actor Alec Baldwin apologising for calling his 11-year-old daughter a “rude, thoughtless pig”; we've had the stand-up comedian Michael Richards apologising to black hecklers for telling them, “50 years ago we would have had you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass”; and we've had the DJ Don Imus apologising to the women's basketball team at Rutgers University for calling them a bunch of “nappy-headed hos”.

The form of the public apology is now well established; a kind of literary genre in its own right. You declare regret not for your comments/actions, but for the fact they were “taken out of context”; you state that you will not make any excuses, while making sure to list the hypothetical excuses you could make if you were, in fact, going to make excuses; and you conclude with a plea to the media to leave the story alone — not for your sake, but for the sake of your tax-deductible foundation for terminally ill puppies, or Uzbek orphans, or whatever.

Take Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman, whose reality show on the A&E network was suspended last week. Dog — famous for catching the serial rapist (and heir to the Max Factor fortune) Andrew Luster — was recorded telling his son to stop dating a black girl, because she was a “f***ing n***er” (his son did the recording, in return for a reported $15,000 payment from the National Enquirer). Dog explained on the recording that his problem wasn't with the girl's race. Oh no. It was because, as a f***ing n***er, she might hear him use the words “f***ing n***er” (apparently a verbal tic of Dog's), and then might sell her story to the Enquirer. Perhaps Dog should give up bounty hunting and become a clairvoyant.

When the recording was broadcast, Dog didn't so much apologise as attempt to disembowel himself on national TV. Weeping into his blonde mullet, he declared that he would not make any excuses. Then he said: “I thought I was cool enough to be able to use that [N-word] amongst black people. I thought I was cool with people that I know and love who are black, who, you know, can call me ‘whitey'.” Perhaps Dog has a point. Don't all white men have black friends to whom they refer fondly, and in person, as “f***ing n***ers”?

But let's be honest here: as repulsive as Dog the Bounty Hunter may be, he and his fellow celebrity transgressors have done us all a favour.

Because the next time we do something stupid, something inexcusable — and we all do this, don't we? — we can console ourselves with one thought: someone much richer and much more famous than us has almost certainly had to apologise for something far, far worse.

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