E! Fun Facts

About

E! Fun Facts are a series of photoshopped parodies that poke fun at E!‘s controversial pop-up trivia highlighting Michael J. Fox’s 1991 diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease as a “fun fact” during its online coverage of the Golden Globes red carpet ceremony in January 2014.

Origin

On January 12th, 2014, the American cable television channel E! livestreamed their red carpet coverage at the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, California. During the webcast, several popup-style “fun facts” were displayed in the bottom-left corner of the screen, including two particularly off-color factoids about the actors Michael J. Fox and Robert Redford (shown below).

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Immediately after it was displayed, the Daily Mail social media editor Amanda Lucci tweeted a screenshot of the Michael J. Fox “Fun Fact”:

this is in no way a FUN fact pic.twitter.com/uJ9zSVuEwy
— Amanda Lucci (@alucci) January 12, 2014

Several minutes later, The Daily Show writer Dan Amira tweeted a photoshopped version of the screenshot edited with a fake “fact” that 37 cats had died while filming the 2013 comedy-drama film Inside Llewyn Davis.

These Golden Globes "fun facts" are getting darker and darker pic.twitter.com/SD1E38Pg9o
— Dan Amira (@DanAmira) January 12, 2014

Other Twitter users began posting other satirical “fun facts,” many of which contained comically tragic or disturbing statements. Also on January 12th, 2014, compilations of notable parody tweets were posted by several news sites, including Mediate,^[3] The Huffington Post,^[4]BuzzFeed^[2] and Vulture.^[5] Later that evening, E! issued a public apology for the incident in a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter.^[1]

“We regret the insensitive classification of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s diagnosis during our Eonline [sic] live stream. We understand the serious nature of the disease and sincerely apologize.”