Fox News’ Laura Ingraham was either wildly confused or super committed to a joke on her show The Ingraham Angle on Monday night. Either way, folks online cracked up over the host’s seeming inability to understand that a conversation was about the Netflix show You and not about Ingraham herself.
Ingraham had guest Raymond Arroyo on the show to complain about, you guessed it, “wokeness” in Hollywood. Arroyo tried to explain to Ingraham that You had a significant storyline based around antivax parents who refused to get their child jabbed for measles. What resulted was a bad version of Abbott and Costello’s classic “who’s on first” bit.
“I was watching an episode of You where measles came up,” Arroyo said.
Ingraham answered, “Wait, wait, wait, when did I mention measles?”
“I don’t know, it was on You,” Arroyo said.
“Wai-, wha-, what was on me?” Ingraham answered.
You can watch the interaction here. It goes on for like an entire minute.
Now, I’m going to share my opinion here. I think this is faked and an attempt at humor, your typical ploy to go viral and have a laugh. Others on the Mashable team disagree. I think a lot of the segment seemed staged but the part that totally does it, for me, comes at the end of the video.
“It’s a show, called You, on Netflix,” Arroyo finally said at the end of the clip, acting flustered.
“There’s a show called Laura Ingraham on Netflix?” Ingraham responds, incredulous.
I mean…come on. That’s clearly an attempt at a joke, in my opinion that has been impossibly jaded by spending too many years working online where people game the system for virality all the time. Others agreed, however.
Others seemed to think it wasn’t a joke or a bit.
Make of the segment what you will. My personal theory is as follows: It was intended to be an obvious joke but it was done so poorly that it went over folks’ heads. Those people, in turn, mocked Ingraham and the viral video took off from there. Either way, enjoy.
