A Fox News guest fell out of his chair Friday night while taking a selfie with host Laura Ingraham.
And now, as The Washington Post’s Abby Ohlheiser would say, it is content.
It was, obviously, an intentional gag. Author (and long-lost Rick Santorum twin?) Raymond Arroyo had come on the “Ingraham Angle” to appear in a segment of the show called “Friday Follies.”
Arroyo and Ingraham first poked fun at a group that had marched to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s house that morning — chanting “Chug! Chug! Chug!” and “I like beer!” — to protest Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault.
The pair then moved on to mocking other anti-Kavanaugh protesters inside the Senate, as well as a new California law requiring publicly held companies to include more women on their boards.
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Finally, Arroyo touched on a recent study that showed more than 250 people worldwide have died taking selfies.
“Narcissism,” Ingraham chimed in.
It was a long setup.
At the end, Arroyo produced a six-pack of Bud Light and set it down with a thud on Ingraham’s desk.
“Okay, before I go — I thought, just to bring it all together, Laura, the whole segment, we’ll take a selfie,” he said.
The two pretended to make a toast with their beers while angling for Arroyo’s cellphone camera.
“Smile!” he said, pretending to shift around to get the optimal selfie. “Do we have it? Wait. I have to angle it this way. Wait, wait — ooh!”
And with that, Arroyo tumbled out of his chair. The segment ended. Punchline complete.
Still, it wasn’t long before the clip made the rounds on social media, shared by a not insignificant number of people who seemed to think it was real — or who at least kept watching it, even if they knew it was staged.
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“Are you all right after your fall?” one person tweeted to Arroyo. “We kept hearing Laura Ingraham telling you to get closer to the edge. Sounds like a lawsuit to me.”
Share this articleShare“I’m going to watch this an absurd number of times,” tweeted Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama.
the complete, instantaneous lack of empathy from ingraham is my favorite part
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) October 6, 2018Ingraham eventually tweeted to her “concerned viewers” Friday night that the fall had indeed been “a JOKE ... a pratfall after a long week.” But by then, the Internet content gods had spoken, and the clip had shape-shifted into whatever the person watching it wanted it to be.
Some said Ingraham was lying to cover up an accident. Others accused Ingraham of being a robot for not checking to see if Arroyo was okay after his fall. Those who thought it was staged from the beginning began mocking those who hadn’t.
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Even after being convinced the bit was staged, at least one Twitter user begged to remain in blissful ignorance: “... let me have this one, we need this after this week.”
And, of course, the fall was immortalized in a GIF within hours of broadcast.
On Saturday morning, Ingraham attempted again to emphasize that the bit had been a joke.
“We have a great team at #IngrahamAngle — a sense of humor required,” she tweeted.
Arroyo also reassured those in doubt that his fall was indeed a planned gag before laughing at becoming content.
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