As he’s been known to do, recently Steve Harvey made a mean-spirited joke about Asian men’s lack of sexual desirability on his eponymous talk show. Of course, that kind of joke always says a lot more about the person who’s telling it than the people it’s targeting. (Perhaps Harvey stood next to Steven Yeun at a party once, and has been desperately trying to prove something to himself ever since.) Nevertheless, social media immediately rallied to let Harvey know that his attempt to deny the fuckability of Dev Patel wasn’t going to fly. Celebrity chef Eddie Huang even chimed in with a New York Times editorial about his struggle for self-acceptance that also implied that Huang would absolutely “steal [Harvey’s] girl.”
At first, Harvey tried to avoid confronting how wrong he was about both Ken Watanabe and Tadanobu Asano, scurrying to meet with America’s president-elect Donald Trump presumably so they could reassure each other that their wives wouldn’t cheat on them with Daniel Dae Kim given the chance. But now it seems that Harvey has finally had a chance to sit down and look up Buzzfeed’s “21 Gorgeous Asian Men Guaranteed To Make You Thirsty,” because he has issued an apology of sorts for the segment:
How a joke whose punchline is an outright denial of the sexual capital of an entire group of people that happens to include Vincent Rodriguez III (a.k.a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Josh Chan) wasn’t meant disrespectfully remains unclear. It’s also worth nothing that it took an entire week and international news headlines for Harvey to squeak out even that half-assed statement on his phone, but we forgive him. After all, he had a lot of K-drama to catch up on.