Things haven’t been going particularly well for Megyn Kelly now that she’s moved from the safe bubble of Fox News and stepped into the harsher spotlight of NBC, and that was still the case for Kelly’s big Today debut this week. Fresh off of announcing that she would no longer focus primarily on politics, Kelly transitioned into an easy, Today-friendly chat with the cast of Will And Grace and a “super fan” of the show who was clearly very excited to be there, and after discussing all of the good that the show did for gay rights, Kelly walking things back a bit with a question about whether or not the super fan “became gay” because of the show.
It was clearly intended as a joke, but the idea of someone becoming gay from a TV show is also pretty homophobic. Some people might be able to get away with a joke like that, but Kelly doesn’t exactly have a reputation for making clever jokes or possessing much of a sense of humor. She does, however, have a reputation for espousing weird and stupid beliefs on TV, like the time she famously asserted that Santa Claus is white.
After all of that, Will And Grace star Debra Messing has noted in the comments to an Instagram post (via Page Six) that she regrets doing the Megyn Kelly interview. She says they didn’t know it would be Kelly until that morning, just that it would be a Today appearance, and she’s “dismayed” by Kelly’s comment.