Gas-pump video staged? Damn you Jay Leno! I really promoted this for you! And it ends up being fake? I hate you! Again Jay Leno.. The smoking gun, has come up with some powerful arguments to illustrate the fact that the fantastic couple that showed up randomly on the Jay Leno show, pumping their gas and singing and dancing, we’re complete fakers.. Did I say, DAMN YOU JAY!
5/13 UPDATE: In an interview today, Monifa Sims acknowledged her prior “Tonight Show” appearance, claiming that, “When it happened again, I said, ‘I cannot believe it!'”
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There is something fishy about that viral “Tonight Show” video starring a Los Angeles couple performing some purportedly impromptu karaoke at a Burbank gas station.
As Jay Leno tells it, Will Sims, 40, and his wife Monifa, 38, recently went to the Costco station to fill up. While there, they happened upon the
The segment features actor Tim Stack portraying a news anchor who is seen on a TV screen above one of the pumps. After breaking away from his news reading, Stack engages (and jokes with) customers via a remote camera.
During the segment with the Simses, the couple sang (and danced) to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” (Will) and the Eurythmics’s “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (Monifa) in exchange for gas money. Leno was so pleased with the feel-good bit, he had the married couple on the show last Wednesday and let them sit in with the house band.
Leno introduced Will as a bartender and Monifa as a fitness trainer, enthusing that “these people were so entertaining.” He then said, “You know, this almost seems like a plant,” before adding that staffers had no idea that the too-good-to-be-true duo were coming to the Costco station, which is less than three miles from Leno’s Burbank studio.
If the “Pumpcast News” skit was the Leno show’s attempt to create the kind of viral hit that has become the métier of the Jimmys Kimmel and Fallon, it was a grand success. The clip (seen below) has been viewed more than 7.5 million times on the “Tonight Show” page on YouTube–far exceeding any other “Leno” video–and it accounts for more than 25 percent of the program’s combined YouTube views.
5/13 UPDATE: In a TSG interview this afternoon, Monifa Sims contended that it was just a fluke that she appeared a second time on “Pumpcast News,” adding that, “When it happened again, I said, ‘I cannot believe it!’” Remarkably, the actress claimed that she and her husband never bothered to actually watch her first appearance on Leno’s top-rated program. “I’m not glued to my TV at night,” said Sims.
Asked why no mention was made of her prior “Pumpcast News” appearance (or her and Will’s acting careers), Sims said “Tonight Show” producers “don’t want people to think that they planned this thing.” She added, “We have been honest with them the whole time.”
Sims said that it was only after she and her husband did their karaoke tunes that Will realized that this was her second time around. Sims recalled, “He asked me, ‘Is this what you did before?’”
“This really is a one-in-a-million chance,” said Sims of appearing on Leno’s show. Well, perhaps two in a million.