Chances are high that you know this year’s Miss Universe crown was won by Miss Philippines Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach. And it wasn’t even necessary to watch Sunday night’s pageant to pick up on that, as the entire Internet has been abuzz with host Steve Harvey accidentally announcing Miss Colombia as the winner. Even though seemingly everyone on the planet has poked fun at the comedian for his flub, it was still a relatively small-scale gaffe, and it certainly wasn’t enough to take him out of the host conversations for the future. In fact, the powers that be want him back next year.
Mark Shapiro, the Chief Content Officer at WME IMG (which took over Miss Universe from Donald Trump), had nothing but good things to say about Harvey after it was all said and done. Here’s how he responded when asked if Harvey would be welcomed back.
Absolutely, absolutely. If anything, I’m sure Fox would support it, because as I said, he did a great job. He was funny, he was informative, he’s high energy, he’s got a great following. The man is wildly successful in all different walks of life, with books and radio and television and so on. I definitely want him back and I would hate to see him not come back. He’s going to want a shot to redeem himself.
Indeed, a comedian is probably the best entertainer possible to make a widely seen error like that, since they’re generally good at laughing things off. Hell, I bet Steve Harvey’s jokes about his mistake are funnier than the thousands of memes and snide remarks on Twitter. And if he would come back next year, you just know he’d draw attention to it in some way, perhaps making a spectacle out of confirming he has the right name by the time the announcement is to be made.
Shapiro, who stopped by The Jim Rome Show to talk about all this, gave Harvey a lot of props for going back out there and correcting himself. Apparently the Family Feud host was having a rough time over it backstage, as Shapiro said Harvey was humiliated and full of regrets over the snafu. He had to have been thinking about the online flood of judgment, right?
All that said, Shapiro doesn’t even understand why it happened, saying it’s the same card that Harvey rehearsed with the whole day (although the rehearsal period was a point of contention itself). He said Harvey was questioning the teleprompter screen, but the winner’s name was never on it, so that also seems like a disconnected excuse.
Whatever the reason for it, Steve Harvey’s mis-crowning will almost definitely be what comes to mind anytime someone brings up Miss Universe for the next year. Here’s hoping he comes back to Fox in 2016 to make up for it.
Photo courtesy of Fox.
