For reasons that are best left unknown, producers of The Daily Share, a “news” program on HLN (formerly CNN Headline News), asked Twitter comedian/troll/wiseacre Jon Hendren, better known as @fart, to come on live television and discuss Edward Snowden. There are about four million ways this could have gone wrong — this was, after all, the same guy who got “the Smash Mouth guy” to eat a bunch of eggs — and boy, did it go wrong. Just not in a way that anyone could have expected. Consider it Way #4,000,001.
The interview starts out normal enough. Hendren is identified as a “Snowden Supporter,” a clip from Last Week Tonight plays, host Yasmin Vossoughian asks why Snowden’s any different from ISIS, etc. Then Hendren says, “I think to cast him out, to make him invalid in society, simply because he has scissors for hands, I mean that’s strange. I mean people didn’t get scared until he started sculpting shrubs into dinosaur shapes and what not.”
Vossoughian barely reacts, probably because she’s thinking, “How have I never noticed Edward Scissorhands and Edward Snowden have so much in common? Like, um, they both have the same first names and, um, they’re not Ed from the classic movie Ed. He’s a monkey. I guess that’s about it.”
Esquire caught up with Hendren to ask, how the hell did this happen?
ESQUIRE: So why did they reach out to you in the first place?
JON HENDREN: I honestly don’t know. I got an email last night asking if I wanted to come on and replied immediately saying, “Yes I absolutely would,” before I even read the entire email.
ESQUIRE: Was your plan all along to pretend you were talking about Scissorhands? Did it throw you off that she never seemed to acknowledge it?
JON HENDREN: Yeah. I believe Edward Scissorhands is a hero and was unfairly treated by the American people. I was surprised that they didn’t cut me off immediately, so I just kept rolling with it assuming at some point they’d hang up, and they never did for some reason. (Via)
I mean, he’s not wrong. Edward Scissorhands was unfairly treated. And HLN wasn’t wrong to put someone named @fart on live television.
I’ve always said this.
(Via Esquire)
