I hate myself for commenting on this but here it goes.
Last week on The View Sherri Shepherd admitted that she did not know if the Earth was flat or not. This was after an exceptionally poor attempt to begin a debate on evolution, which Sherri also does not believe in. Everyone, of course, jumped all over this to quickly point out that she was an idiot and revel in the fact that their sixth grade education made them better than her. Understandable. People love that sort of thing. After last month's Miss Teen South Carolina Debacle, the average dummy already had reason to feel good about themselves. Sherri Shepherd just gave them an extra boost.
Ms. Shepherd made an ass of herself. Just watching the the look on Joy Behar's face during Shepherd's embarrassing tirade pretty much sums up how everyone watching the clip feels. Just watch.
Whoopi Goldberg very simply puts it, "Do you think the Earth is flat?" Ms. Shepherd responds that she does not know to which Whoopi responds, "Well, what do you think?" Ms. Shepherd says that she's never thought about it. Then she goes further to say that what she has thought about is how she was going to feed her children. This is a classic game where the defender brings up something that is more important and tries to imply that a human being cannot, in the same lifetime, both think about whether or not the Earth is flat and think about how to feed their children. There is also the argument to be made that someone who's spent the last decade on television and playing roles in Hollywood films is probably not struggling too hard to feed her children. At least not hard enough to cloud her brain and leave her unable to answer a question that an average six-year-old could answer correctly. One would argue that there are those out there who struggle a little bit more financially on low five-figure salaries and can still tell you the general shape of the earth is at least three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional.
So she's an idiot. Fine. I can deal with that. What I find annoying is that she was back, naturally, the next day to defend herself with this:
Taking a page out of the Universal Idiots' Playbook, Ms. Shepherd claims that she didn't understand the question because she was nervous. We've all been nervous. I'm willing to believe being nervous will make you stumble on your words. I believe it will make you misunderstand a complicated question. I'm willing to believe it may make you forget the answer to a question on a game show or make you answer incorrectly even if you really know the right answer. I am not really willing to believe it will make you misunderstand a question so fundamentally that even after having Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters repeatedly ask you follow ups you will still fail to answer the question correctly.
Perhaps what nervousness really does is make you incredibly stupid until the cameras are off you and spend a few hours consulting people with brains and having a very long and difficult conversation with your agent.
Ms. Shepherd's two excuses are:
- "I was so nervous, all I heard was, 'How many triglycerides does it take to make Pluto when the Robitussin comes and the Earth's sun?' so when they asked me I was like, 'I don't know!'"
- "You know, you have one of the senior brain poopy moments."
Yes. Wow. Firstly, if that's the best complicated question she could come up with given 24 hours then she's not winning anyone over into the Sherri-Shepherd-is-not-really-stupid camp. Secondly, a senior moment? That's cute when an 85-year-old woman says it because she momentarily forgets the name of one of her 17 grand nieces. Not so much when a 40-year-old woman actually doesn't know that the Earth is round and is trying to backpedal to not seem stupid.