Steve Harvey has long been notorious for saying stupid things.
Emmy Award-winning TV host and best-selling author Steve Harvey advises women not to date atheists because you don’t know where the man’s “moral barometer” is, and says that as far as someone not believing in God, “well, then, to me you’re an idiot.”
Harvey, who also hosts a radio show and started his career in stand-up comedy, went on to say that Darwinism is essentially nonsense because he doesn’t think the universe “spun out of a gastrous ball and then all of a sudden we were evolved from monkeys.” If that were true, he says, then “why we still got monkeys?”
Yep, that’s his argument, the dumbest argument against evolution ever…although at least he spiced it up with that “gastrous ball” comment. So now I am full of schadenfreude at his latest gaffe.
Harvey was hosting the Miss Universe pageant, and at the final moment, when it’s down to two contestants, one of whom will win honor and glory and vast power as the Queen of the Universe (that’s what this pageant is about, right?), he screwed up horribly. It was to be either Miss Colombia or Miss Philippines, and Harvey announced the wrong one, live on broadcast television. Miss Colombia was given the flowers, the banner, the diamond-encrusted tiara of invincible power, and was happily giving her queenly waves to the cheering crowd, when Harvey had to stand up and declare his horrible mistake. Then followed one of the most uncomfortable moments in television as Miss Columbia is stripped of her honors, and they’re given to Miss Philippines, standing there not sure what she’s supposed to do.
Steve Harvey, idiot.
As if that weren’t enough, Harvey later sent an apologetic tweet to Miss Columbia and Miss Philippians.
He’s got to be in the running for Dumbest Man in Show Business. I sure hope the announcer doesn’t make a mistake when naming the winner. It would be so awkward for Shia LaBeouf to have to stand there while the bladder on a stick was taken away and given to Harvey.
If Steve Harvey exists, how come there are still assholes?
This is your brain on Jesus. Any questions?
God obviously wanted Miss Columbia to win. Harvey should not have abandoned his faith in his divine moral barometer.
Gastrous? Like “gastric”? Ohhh, he meant “gaseous”. Pathetic.
My father also told me once that if I didn’t believe in God I was an “idiot”. Turned out he was himself a nonbeliever, albeit one in deep, deep cover (he was an elder in a Presbyterian church for 50 years, until the day he died). The “idiocy” in question was, if I am reading this correctly in the light of experience, not being super careful to fit in to the cultural norm like he did when he became an American citizen.
Sastra, the name of the country is Colombia, not Columbia. (PZ, you misspelled it once yourself.)
Having gotten that out of the way, the profundity of Mr. Harvey’s idiocy is truly awe inspiring.
I’m not enjoying that his blunder apparently gave all the racists license to be openly racist.
It’s like, are such people ever capable of a reasoned criticism?
How many of these fuckers vote?
Regarding the “if we evolved from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys” “argument” Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology has some interesting comments here:-
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/if-apes-evolved-from-monkeys-why-are-there-still-monkeys/
In (a tiny shred of) fairness, the card’s design was terrible. Second and first runners up on the top left, winner in tiny type on the bottom left.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-miss-universe-ballot-card-steve-harvey-misread-2015-12?r=US&IR=T
And now, a reading from Steve Harvey’s Epistle to Miss Philippians…
I’ve never heard of Mr Harvey, but speculated-to-myself he might be a racist (many key ingredients seem to be present), and was about to try and make a snark or joke of being unable to distinguish between two other-looking people. Had I done so, I would have been just as much of an eejit as Mr Harvey: He has won multiple awards from the NAACP.
(Can we teach teh trum-prat to do even this simple level of research?)
I think the whole “mistake” was staged. Look at the cue card he claims he “misread”, even idiots would not mistake “1s runner up” for “winner”.
Sorry if I suspect dishonesty from the spectacle producers and not simply a flub by the idiot presenter.
The cue card was badly designed, [there is a Twitter image of it out there] but even an idiot would see it as incomprehensible and ask the stage manager for a better cue card.
As much as I dislike Harvey, I will give him a pass for accepting the blame for the producers who staged this event, telling him it will increase his fame by making him the person to Gawk [TM] at for such a stupid mistake.
ack. too silly. USA was 3rd, maybe that’s why he misdirected the tiara…
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. Hamlet Act One, Scene 5
Racist douchebags are crawling out of the woodwork to excoriate Harvey for his mistake.
That sounds like something they might serve at the Minnesota State Fair.
People make mistakes. He made a mistake. A hilarious mistake, but a simple human mistake. And what was hurt? Some woman who thought she won a ridiculous contest didn’t win in lieu of another woman?
Not sure this makes Harvey as bad as Musk.
Even without this latest blunder, I get enough schadenfreude knowing Harvey can’t land a better job. He’s barely hanging onto the bottom rung of the entertainment ladder that he shares with Drew Carey, one step above B-movies.
Not sure anyone said that. Actually, I’m quite sure no one said that.
Someone got their hopes crushed on live television, but eh what the hell, it’s just some woman in a ridiculous contest, so it’s not like it hurt anything, amirite?
Todd Morgan @ 15:
Oh, right. It was just a couple of women, who entered a silly contest, which didn’t require any commitment, investment, hard work, and of course, they didn’t have any hopes or dreams, no, nothing like that. Just a couple of stupid
womencrumpets, goodness, who could ever care about that? The important thing was guffawing at this oh-so-hilarious mistake, and noting that no objects were hurt, because outside of Harvey, there weren’t any other people involved.Also, Todd Morgan, look at your fucking word choice. “And what was hurt?” What. Not Who. You’re quite the piece of disgusting work.
he spiced it up with that “gastrous ball”
Yes, the universe was once a very small hot bezoar.
SQUEE! I got to use “bezoar” in a sentence!!!
@17
You’re right. PZ called Musk a terrible person, and only called harvey an idiot. Guess that implies that Musk is still worse.
He (Drew Carey) is worth north of $165M and earns ~$15M per year. Some bottom rung.
@19. you’re right. that was a poor word choice. Meant to type “what was the harm”, but it got all mixed up in my fingers.
Musk was not mentioned in this post at all. No one here is making comparisons between the two except you.
@24
Musk was mentioned last week. PZ’s opinion of him still stands as far as I know. I was being sarcastic. I’m still bitter about PZ calling Musk a terrible human being.
NEVER FORGET!
NEVER GROW UP!
The bad news is that Donald Trump will make some points with this. No mistakes this big happened on his watch, etc. This bad thing happened because the Great Trumpster was removed from beauty pageant heaven, etc.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It could HAVE been staged. Look how much press John Travolta and Idina Menzel got after his Oscar mistake. Certainly I had no clue that Miss Universe was even still a thing anymore until this blew up my newsfeed.
Whatever feelings I may have about beauty contests, I can’t help but feel for a contestant at any competition who is handed the prize only for it to be awkwardly taken away again in front of thousands of people live in the venue and millions on TV. I’d run away to join a nunnery after that experience.
#5 cervantes,
“Columbia” and “Philippians” was in Harvey’s tweet. I kinda sorta understand “Columbia”, but Philippians?
I thought it was good of him to correct the mistake right away. Much more embarrassing, but at least the actual winner got a couple of minutes in the spotlight. If it had been me, I would have been very tempted to wait until after the ceremony and the cameras were off and someone else brought it up, making the correction a press release the next day or something.
But then again, if it was me, I would have made darned sure before the broadcast that I knew exactly what the results card would look like.
On the stress of being on stage, reading is one of those things that can be easily screwed up because you can only put part of your attention to it, because you’re essentially performing a role just as much as any actor. You have to hit your mark, at the right time, point yourself at the right camera, project the required personality, monitor the audience for feedback (hard when the lights are on you and the in-venue audience is nearly invisible), and then deliver the information on the card, which you haven’t seen up to that point. If you’re not supposed to read verbatim, but process the data and give out the required info in a different, pre-arranged format, that can put a lot of stress on the intellect when you don’t necessarily have a lot of intellect spare (not being rude about Harvey). In that case, putting the info on the card in a complicated way is almost guaranteed to produce confusion in someone at some point. If the first thing you see is the word “1st”, then I can see someone jumping to the name and getting the wrong idea about what they’re supposed to be saying.
By way of contrast, the producers of the Oscars broadcast actually have a contingency plan for this situation. Whatever you think of Harvey’s mistake, it’s not his responsibility to plan for a screw-up like this; the producers dropped the ball too.
I thought that as well. It would have worked a lot better if the card had been actual sentences for him to read out : “The second runner up for the Miss Universe pageant is __(pasted in result)_”, etc.
Interesting – what do they do?
slithey tove @11:
Perhaps this may persuade you to reconsider:
MSNBC host Thomas Roberts:
Given a lack of evidence (that I’m aware of) to support the idea that this mistake was staged, I think human error is the best assumption at this point.
carlie @35:
As I understand it, someone from the accounting firm is stationed offstage, and if the wrong name is ever announced, they will simply go on stage and announce the correct winner.
re 36:
apologies
I was expecting to be called out for lack of evidence for my hasty conclusion of “staged”. I tried to disqualify it by considering other possibilities, but based on the appearance of the actual card….
Didn’t watch the event, so the next question is honestly presented.
Did he also declare USA as the “runner-up”? Since USA was labeled as 2nd Runner-up, which if Harvey was honestly misreading the card, could consider 2nd as THE runner up, with “1st runner-up” being misread as “1st place”.
…yikes…
seems I finally realized a reasonable explanation for Harvey honestly making a reasonable misreading:
“2nd Runner-up” was misread as “2nd place”
“1st Runner-up” was misread as “1st place”.
the blame squarely rests on the confusing layout of the card. Why place the winner in small print in the lower right corner of the card, with a big font label: MISS UNIVERSE 2015 above it? That big font label could be mistaken to be for the event and not the title for the name below it.
ugh, I retract my accusation. I blew the whistle mistakenly. I can see how he could have misread that poorly designed card.
Actually not the worst thing related to the Miss Universe pageant this year. The worst is Miss Puerto Rico’s anti-Muslim rant.
@andyo, 31
I would assume he botched the spelling of Philippines, his autocorrect gave him Philippians, and he did not notice/bother to double check.
Matrim, #40
He seems to have a knack for not bothering to double check.
No mention yet that Harvey is also an extremely sexist, homophobic asswipe?
If Jesus was the Messiah, why are there still Jews?
If the wrong name was read out for all the world to hear, why not just go with it? The judges were the only one who knew, and it was probably only a few points on their judging scale. I’d have sworn all the judges to silence, gotten the card back from Mr Harvey, and never said a damn word. It seems egotistical, somehow, that the judges had to have the last word.
I saw a few minutes of the pageant, earlier, but changed the channel. I heard later some mention of a kerfuffle, but didn’t care enough to listen. Wow.
They should have done it better. From what I recall, pageants announce the third-place
person as the second runner-up, then the second-place person as the first runner-up, which is confusing, and also means that they don’t actually announce the winner as such at the time. They should have a small group of finalists, first announce second place, then declare the winner.
I got some surprisingly unexpected company, for my idiotic comment@11
read:
— reported at Jezebel with embolding added by me
[only reviving this long dead thread to express my genuine surprise]