If the 24-hour news cycle wasn’t a joke before, it certainly is now. Presumably desperate for SOME kind of story in the aftermath of the election, CNN’s Don Lemon, who I’d never heard of before today, yesterday tweeted “Said hi to @JonahHill in hotel. Think he thought i was bellman. Didn’t know his name til bellman told me. A lesson to always be kind.”
Yes, quite the lesson. Sometimes you go up to say hi to a guy, and he says hi back, but he doesn’t do it good enough and you’re like, “Whatever, jerk, I don’t even know your name!” Hey, Mother Goose! It’s your cousin, Marvin Goose! You know that new fable you’re looking for? Well listen to this!
Because CNN is an important hard news channel, they had Lemon on Soledad O’Brien’s morning show this morning to “set the record straight.” It’s a very important story, and I considered it my journalistic duty to transcribe the story exactly as Lemon told it:
“I was stuck in an airport in Cincinnati for six hours, because a cab driver wanted to take a picture with me. I missed the cutoff for my bag. Listen, Jonah Hill doesn’t owe me anything, and he may have been having a bad day, but he treated me like the help.
I basically just wanted to say ‘I like you, I think you’re funny.’ I didn’t remember his name, I was checking out of the hotel. And he walked by, and I said, and he just kinda just, kinda like… oh. Like I was the help. And so then he walked by, and so I was like ‘Maybe you misunderstood, I just wanted to tell you that I think you’re really funny.’ And he just kinda like gave me the wet handshake, kinda like ohh, and just, like ehhh, and then walked away.
And so I looked at the Bellman, and I said, what’s that guy’s name? And he said ‘Jonah Hill,’ and I went ‘Oh,’ and he went ‘ohhh. And he was like ‘…yeah. right.’
And so, it normally doesn’t bother me. But I was DONE, because I had been taught to always be kind to people.”
Let us not forget, this man is in charge of telling stories for a living. Can you imagine if Don Lemon been on the ground during one of history’s real crises? “That’s right, John. I was on the scene when the Shah addressed the protesters. The Shah kinda came up to them and was like, ‘hey, I just wanted to tell you you’re really treasonous,’ and then the students were just kinda like ‘ehh,’ and the Shah just sorta gave them a limp sorta wave, and they were like ‘ohh,’ and then I saw the Savak and the Savak and I looked at each other and they were just kinda like ‘…oh,’ and I was like ‘ahh, yeah… right.’ But I was DONE, because my great aunt June always taught me that having secret police was kind of like whatever. Also I was feeling really kind of pleh because I waited three hours at the falaffel restaurant that night. “
