https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPXL5eDAOtI
Less than 24 hours after delivering a brief speech during the Republican National Convention’s first night in Cleveland, actor and Starbucks critic Scott Baio traded jabs with MSNBC’s Tamron Hall. And by “traded jabs,” I mean the star of Joanie Loves Chachi and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 defended some crude jokes about Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton that he’d recently tweeted. What’s more, Hall even called Baio out for blocking her on Twitter and asked him why. His response? “That might have been a mistake.”
Baio otherwise spent most of the segment arguing for tweeting out a joke about Michelle’s looks in 2010, and more recently, Clinton’s standing in front of a blurred banner suggesting the use of an inappropriate word.
“That tweet was a joke. Tamron, I’m a guy from Brooklyn. I have a certain sense of humor. I sit around with my buddies, we smoke cigars and we make jokes… It’s a joke about a woman yelling at her husband. If we talk about, ‘Oh my wife did this. My wife is busting my chops today.’ We do it about everybody’s wife. I do it about my friend’s wife. I do it about all politicians’ wives.”
Throughout the explanation, Hall repeatedly interrupted Baio with questions meant to provoke. Bits like, “Did you think about that in church, when you tweeted it out?” (Baio claimed earlier in the interview he’d written his RNC speech in church.) Or, “Does joking about a woman that way ‘Make America Great Again’?”
Needless to say, the three-minute chunk above never recovered from the obvious awkwardness on display between Hall and Baio. Plus, with the background audience favoring Baio’s rebuttals (and the original tweeted jokes) more often than not, Hall faced an uphill battle throughout the segment.
You can watch the full interview below.
Tamron Hall asks Baio about controversial Tweet: “Does joking about a woman that way make America great again.” https://t.co/kboqVVjRzW
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 19, 2016