Anyone who has ever listened to Vice President Kamala Harris speak knows she has a tendency to laugh at awkward moments and offer profundities that may or may not be profound.
During a recent interview on The Drew Barrymore Show, Harris took on the laughing matter with – you guessed it – an attempted profundity… and not much else.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Michael Knowles, host of The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles Show, to discuss Harris’ sit down with Barrymore and how it highlighted that the vice president has nothing to say.
Kamala Harris Laugh
Harris has been out on the campaign trail and sitting down with friendly media for weeks now, and her latest stop brought her to the couch of Drew Barrymore’s daytime talk show. The interview, which aired Monday, taped last week and a promotional clip was dropped in which the vice president talked about her style of laugh.
In response to a question from the actress about what it’s like to be the first woman to serve as vice president, Harris brought up some of the criticism she has heard about herself. “My staff… sometimes they’ll show me little things that just amuse me,” she said. “Like, apparently, some people love to talk about the way I laugh.”
She then explained the source of it. “I have my mother’s laugh and I grew up around a bunch of women in particular who laughed from the belly,” Harris explained. “They laughed — they would sit around the kitchen and drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs.”
Harris said she is “never going to be” the type of person who downplays her emotions with a more demure giggle. “I’m just not that person, and I think it’s really important for us to remind each other and, and our younger ones don’t be confined to other people’s perception about what this looks like, how you should act in order to be,” she added. “Right? It’s really important. It’s, it’s important.”
This entire exchange occurred, Megyn noted, while Barrymore was sitting strangely close to Harris. “She must be three inches away… even Kamala Harris has got to be uncomfortable. I feel like the Secret Service is probably like ‘a little farther away, madam,'” she surmised. “I hate everything about this clip.”
No Laughing Matter
More importantly, however, Megyn said the vice president missed the point. “This is classic Kamala Harris trying to offer fake profundities with her fake affect when she is saying nothing,” she explained. “The mocking of Kamala Harris’ laugh is… because it is deployed at very odd times… like as a deflection or as a protective mechanism.”
Knowles agreed. “I can’t think of one thought that [Harris] has ever expressed, which obviously explains why she leans into the laugh so much,” he said. “The longer and louder she can laugh, the less she has to speak because when she speaks, it’s just fillers, just words that are bunched up together that have no semantic content to them. It’s astounding.”
Ultimately, Megyn likened the vice president’s seemingly nervous habit to a certain fictional character. “We love the show Modern Family and Claire Dunphy [played by Julie Bowen] always laughs when someone tells her there has been a death in the family,” she concluded. “That’s Kamala Harris. She is inappropriate with the laugh. No one gives a sh-t that she got the laugh from the mother.”
You can check out Megyn’s interview with Knowles by tuning in to episode 777 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.