Patrick Stewart And Ian McKellen Play The Newlywed Game And Generally Win The Internet Forever

Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen share the same superpower: they can each win the internet any day they please. Put them together, however, and you have an unstoppable force of bowler hats and bromance.

The dashing duo of Stewart and McKellen recently appeared on BuzzFeed Brews, where they played a ramshackle version of The Newlywed Game with dry erase boards and guffaws aplenty. Despite their very public and unbelievably popular on social media friendship, the pair of X-Men actors seemed to have a difficult time coming up with matching answers.

When asked what Stewart’s go-to karaoke song would likely be, Stewart revealed the correct answer would have been “Yesterday” (one can easily assume it’s the song by the Beatles, but only because who else could’ve possibly written a song titled “Yesterday” that would one day become Patrick Stewart’s karaoke killshot?) while McKellen went the safe, and incorrect, route of suggesting it was the entire music genre of country & western.

When Stewart was asked “What is one role Ian is dying to play, or revive?”, he thought long and hard for nearly a minute before writing “Spooner on Film”. McKellen’s handy dry erase board revealed the proper response to be “Widow Twankey (Aladdin’s Mother)”, prompting Stewart to say:

“I’ve seen his Widow Twankey. And that is not a loaded remark.”

According to a recent report in Adweek, for the six month period that Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were subtly promoting their twin bill of No Man’s Land and Waiting For Godot(which ended their dual run on March 31st), the two friends were more popular than Oreo and Coco-Cola across the holy trinity of social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

For example, between October 1st, 2012 and March 31st, 2014, Patrick Stewart tweeted 105 times, earning an impressive 500,000 retweets and favorites. Oreo, widely considered a social branding juggernaut, clocked in only 46,300 retweets/favorites.

A video of Stewart teaching then-fiancee, now wife, Sunny Ozell, the secrets of the mythical “quadruple take” went viral last summer, serving as a solid lead-in to his recent further conquest of social media.

Of the two, Ian McKellen is more active on Facebook, where during the same time period his posts garnered 2.7 million likes, shares, and comments. Coca-Cola’s Facebook efforts, on the other hand, brought them only 1.2 million likes, shares, or comments.

Stewart and McKellen performed best across all platforms, however, when they posted together, such as they did when they recently gallivanted around New York after the closing of their two plays.

Up next for Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen is a return to the big screen as they both reprise their roles of Charles “Professor X” Xavier and Erik “Magneto” Lehnsherr, respectively, in Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, due out May 23rd.