How James Corden foiled a Twitter troll
He killed her with kindness.
After Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint in Paris last week, the internet hate machine that starts complaining halfway through the word “Kardashian” (and is, in fact, already protesting this sentence) descended.
“As I scrolled through the thing on Twitter, I just saw horrific stuff,” said James Corden, the host of CBS’s “The Late Late Show,” on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher.
In response, he tweeted this:
“You can keep your opinion,” he said on the podcast. “But at this moment, five hours after the story’s been released, just take a breath and go, ‘Well, I don’t need to write that! What good can come of that?’”
He added that, while he withholds “the right to offend and be offended” as a professional comedian, he wants to fight negativity online with positivity. Corden told the story of a woman who tweeted in September that he was (by his own recollection — the original tweet has been deleted) “fat, talentless and egotistical.”
“I was like, ‘Wow, that’s intense,’” he said. “So I looked at her profile, and she had a vegan website with recipes. I was like, there’s three things I can do here: I could ignore it, which is what you’d normally do; I could engage in it, which is stupid; or I can just absolutely put my arms around her.”
He chose option three:
And the message got through. The original tweeter apologized:
“You cannot, it is impossible, for you to love someone too much,” Corden said.
“You will only educate people by loving them and showing them another way,” he added. “That’s all there is to it. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
You can listen to Recode Decode in the audio player above, or subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn and Stitcher.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
