Jay Leno's 'Spontaneous Gas Pump Karaoke' Segment Was Probably Staged
So that thing you loved on Friday? Happy Monday — it's probably fake.
As part of their ongoing series of articles bent on taking everything good and exposing its less flattering side, The Smoking Gun did a bit of dirt digging and found out that Will and Monfia Sims from the ultra-viral Jay Leno "Pumpcast News" segment are professionally trained actors from Chicago who moved to Hollywood to pursue an onscreen career.
Furthermore, Mrs. Sims — who goes by Monifa Days in her acting resume — had already appeared in a Pumpcast News segment at least once before in 2011, wearing the same pants and driving the same car.
While this doesn't definitively prove that the segment was staged, it does raise some questions worth acknowledging in light of the video's massive success (in just one weekend, the clip already accounts for over a quarter of all The Tonight Show's YouTube views).
Confronted with their acting past and present (which included Monifa winning a national dramatic acting contest in 2005), Will told the Chicago Sun-Times that the producers made up fake job titles for the couple, ironically to make it seem less suspicious.
"[The producers] didn’t want [people] to think we were actors and it was a 'plant,'" Will told the paper. "They were like, ‘You’re a bartender and she’s a fitness [trainer].'"
This would hardly be the first time a late night show made stuff up to ensure a segment was worth airing.
A Gawker investigation recently revealed a significant portion of the tweets featured in Jimmy Kimmel's popular "mean tweets" segments are either definitely fake or else impossible to verify.
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified the couple's Chrysler as a "sedan."
