Vice President Kamala Harris interview in Monday’s episode of The Drew Barrymore Show went viral for all the wrong reasons.
During Barrymore’s puff piece, Harris tried to defend her weird laugh, which tests poorly in focus groups… and it couldn’t have gone worse.
“Don’t be confined by other people’s perception of what this looks like, how you should act in order to be,” she told viewers. Huh?
“You were asking me earlier about what it means to be, like, the first woman,” Harris said in a teaser posted on Barrymore’s Instagram account. “And you know, it’s funny because people still gotta get used to this, right? I mean, my staff, for example, sometimes they’ll show me little things that just amuse me. Like, apparently, some people love to talk about the way I laugh.”
Barrymore nodded. “Oh, yes! I love your laugh,” the Hollywood scion told the vice president.
Then, the unpopular Harris attributed her laugh to her mother’s influence and to perceptions about “how you should act in order to be.”
“I have my mother’s laugh and I grew up around a bunch of women in particular who laughed from the belly. They laughed — they would sit around the kitchen and drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs,” Harris said. “I think it’s really important for us to remind each other and, and our younger ones don’t be confined to other people’s perception about what this looks like, how you should act in order to be. Right? It’s really important. It’s, it’s important.”
Barrymore encouraged her. “I love your laugh and I love that message,” the talk show host said.
The vice president’s interview is set to air Monday on CBS.
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The vice president’s laugh has landed her in trouble before. During California’s 2014 race for attorney general, Harris laughed when asked whether or not to legalize marijuana, and that laugh haunted her in 2019 during her short-lived campaign for president.
Barrymore’s softball interviews have attracted controversy in the past. Last year, she went viral for kneeling before transgender influncer Dylan Mulvaney, the marketer infamous for their Bud Light ad. Barrymore also came under fire last year for airing during the Writers Guild of America strike.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden gave a surprise interview Friday with SiriusXM host Howard Stern, perhaps to dispel concerns about his long refusal to sit for an interview with The New York Times.
“The Times’ desire for a sit-down interview with Biden by the newspaper’s White House team is no secret around the West Wing or within the D.C. bureau,” Politico wrote Thursday after speaking with more than a dozen insiders.
“Last May, when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters for an off-the-record meeting with around 40 Times journalists, [the publisher] devoted several minutes to asking her why Biden was still refusing to grant the paper — or any major newspaper — an interview.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.