Steve Harvey is still having to live down the flub heard around the world nearly a year ago. The charismatic TV personality made a huge mistake while hosting the Miss Universe 2015 pageant. He announced the wrong winner and had to rectify the mistake just a few minutes later, causing people in numerous countries to not be happy with the way the pageant shook out. Harvey later apologized about the whole debacle, but this week he spoke to Jimmy Fallon about the way things actually played out behind-the-scenes. In Steve Harvey's mind, he took one for the team. Here's what he had to say:
It was four minutes of pure hell. It was longer than that. Look, I'm a smart guy. I can read. I read the teleprompter, but the guy in my ear said to read the next name, now. I said, 'Miss Columbia.' I go in the back, four minutes later I hear a lot of words that you can't say on TV. Explicit, explicit, explicit, and then they said, 'We said the wrong name.' Then a guy said, 'What are we gonna do?' And a guy said, 'We'll straighten it out in the media tomorrow.' And I said, 'Naw, man, I'm gonna go do it now.' And I walked out there.
During an appearance on The Tonight Show, Steve Harvey revealed that he initially thought things had gone smoothly during his hosting gig. It was only a few minutes later that the truth was revealed, and there was some dissent behind the scenes of the competition in terms of how people thought the competition should handle the on-air flub. It's clear during the interview that it's still a bit of an awkward thing for Harvey to talk about, mainly due to people's responses about the incident. During the Tonight Show interview, Jimmy Fallon even laughs awkwardly before asking Steve Harvey what happened. The Family Feud host cracks some jokes about Fallon's response, but it is awkward in a lot of ways.
Steve Harvey has mostly owned up to what happened. He's spent the last year poking fun at the flub in commercials and via other outlets. Apparently, the winners card was fairly difficult to follow, and per the story, there was some miscommunication between the teleprompter and what was going on with the producers asking Harvey to just read the card. The whole thing has always seemed like an honest mistake, although an extremely mistimed and devastating flub, especially for Miss Colombia, who was initially crowned the winner and had to hand the crown over to the Philippines just a few short minutes later.
The Miss Universe pageant is giving Steve Harvey a chance to rectify last year's mistake. He's set to present at the Miss Universe 2016 pageant, which will air on January 30, 2017. He's also still hosting a ton of other TV programs, including the recent revival of Showtime at the Apollo. Hopefully, crushing out a few more hosting gigs will help him to get past the big mistake at the Miss Universe 2015 pageant.
If you'd like to take a look at the full Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon interview, pop over to the next page. In addition, to find out what else TV has coming up, check out our midseason TV premiere schedule.
You can check out Steve Harvey promoting his new book and more with Jimmy Fallon, below.
