Resurfaced Footage Shows O.J. Simpson Awkwardly Pretending to Stab A Comic With A Banana
The late O.J. Simpson probably felt a little self-conscious when this monstrously macabre and potassium-rich practical joke didn’t land, but even the great comedians of his time knew that not every bit was going to kill.
After Simpson passed away from prostate cancer last Wednesday, we didn’t see the usual deluge of eulogies celebrating his successes and cultural impact that typically follow a celebrity death. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say that, perhaps, the murder trial wherein Simpson was found not guilty of the gruesome killing of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman left a bad taste in people’s mouths, and his death didn’t make anyone feel like mournfully posting rushing highlights from his NFL career. However, one U.K. media personality has taken it upon herself to commemorate Simpson’s sense of humor – and she’s not talking about The Naked Gun.
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In 1998, Simpson agreed to do a series of tense interviews with British-American comedian and TV presenter Ruby Wax for the BBC wherein she pressed him on the details of the double murder that many reasonable people believed to be Simpson’s doing. After the uncomfortable conversation ended, Simpson promised Wax that he had a “surprise” for her — said Wax, “I think it was his idea of a joke.”
After Simpson pretended to stab Wax with a banana while staring into the camera like a maniac, he then told his interviewer that he wanted to pull the prank using an actual knife but wasn’t able to find one. And, somehow, the jokes didn’t didn’t stop there — Wax also claims that, on the following April 1st, Simpson called her and “confessed” to the murders, telling her, “It's OJ, I did it,” before adding, “April Fools!”
Wax recounted her startling experiences with Simpson in an article she wrote for The Times of London that she bluntly titled, “The Night O.J. Simpson Pretended to Stab Me with a Banana.” According to the now-70-year-old media personality, the banana prank wasn’t even the most unsettling event from her shared time with the alleged killer.
The night before the banana incident, Wax and Simpson had dinner together, during which Simpson asked his interviewer if she wanted to hear his favorite poem. “He went into the poem about Lizzie Borden, who was tried and acquitted of killing her father and stepmother in Massachusetts in 1892,” Wax wrote in her article for The Times, retelling the rhyme, “Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one.”
There you have it! Simpson couldn’t have committed the murders because his weapon of choice was not a knife, but an axe — or, lacking one, a particularly pointy pineapple.
