Jimmy Kimmel Calls for the End of Celebrity Promposals in Impassioned Speech

"This is a hostage situation," he explains

By Francesca Bacardi Apr 13, 2017 3:12 PMTags

Jimmy Kimmel hath decreed: The time has come for celebrity promposals to end.

The Jimmy Kimmel Live! host gave an impassioned speech during his monologue Wednesday evening requesting imploring high school students to stop creating elaborate videos to ask celebrities to prom. Calling the concept "obnoxious," Kimmel partially blamed the students, social media and the celebrities themselves.

His monologue stemmed from a high school student La La Land-themed promposal to Emma Stone, who wrote him a letter thanking him for his invitation but had to decline citing work in London as the reason.

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"Emma Stone has to pretend she's in London for two weeks," Kimmel joked. "It's a cute story. I know, I get it, but it's also terrible and it has to be stopped. Listen, kid. Emma Stone, whether she's in London or not, doesn't want to go to the prom with you. At all. Like it's probably the last thing she wants to do and not because she's in London working. She doesn't want to go to a dance with you because she's 28, and 28-year-old people don't want to go on dates with 16-year-old children because it's creepy."

Kimmel asked everyone to think about the situation in the reverse to highlight just how bizarre this behavior really is. "Why do we find it socially acceptable for a boy to ask an adult celebrity on a date? What if it was the other way around?

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What if Shailene Woodley. No, you know what, what if Shia LaBeouf showed up at a high school looking for a date? He'd be arrested, right? He'd be beaten and arrested, but when this kid asks Emma Stone it's adorable. We put him on GMA."

The late-night talk show host took his point even further by demonstrating how these promposals can actually harm a celebrity's reputation. "In fact, this is a hostage situation because if Emma Stone didn't write him a letter she would look like a jerk," he noted. 

"When I was in high school you liked a girl so you called her house when she answered the phone you got scared and hung the phone up. That was it. That's how you did it," Kimmel continued. 

"I didn't contact Heather Locklear to ask her to go out with me. The audacity in that! Can we please go back to a time before selfies when teenagers had low self-esteem? Now to be fair it's not the kid's fault. Celebrities kind of did this to themselves because a few of them took the bait." 

Kimmel cited Kylie Jenner's recent Sacramento prom surprise as an example of a celebrity who actually followed through on the invitation. "Now every over-confident kid in America has to have a famous date for the prom," he said. "Listen, kids, don't look for your prom date in Us Weekly. It's not cute. Selena Gomez doesn't w ant to make out with you. Go to the cafeteria, find someone your own age, and paw him or her in the back of a limo."