My now husband and I were home watching some TV one evening back in 1999 and ran across an MTV special that looked kind of entertaining: Top 25 Lame Videos. It was hosted by a group of comedians: baby Jon Stewart, Janeane Garofolo, Denis Leary, and Chris Kattan. The premise was that MTV had fans vote on the cheesiest videos ever aired, the comics would mock them, and then the videos were banned for life (Ha! It's funny that MTV thought they'd continue to play music videos!).
So everything's fine and dandy till they get to video #9, "Ice, Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice (Rob Van Winkle). For this video they went a different route. They invited the man himself to come on and host his segment. So they kind of awkwardly watched the video together; the comedians were polite enough to not rip the video in Rob's presence, then handed him a bat to ceremonially destroy the tape of his video. Well, this is how it went down:
My husband and I looked at each other and said "what just happened?" We kept watching because we were pretty sure that nobody had expected him to go flat out insane on the set like that. Jon had a cut on his hand from the flying debris. Janeane looked genuinely terrified for pretty much the rest of the show; she started chain smoking like crazy. It was such a hilariously weird moment. I've wondered since then if Garofalo starts shaking when she hears that song (or even the opening from "Under Pressure") because she seemed so completely freaked out.
Did anyone else happen to witness this moment?
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