Pretend it’s 2011 and you’re at the Cannes Film Festival. You’re wearing a white tuxedo and you’re walking down a set of stairs with paparazzi at literally every turn, but you’re feeling yourself. Then suddenly, you trip and take a completely embarrassing tumble down those stairs, with the world watching.
Then 12 years later, you see pictures of yourself on the internet but people are claiming you’re Jason Derulo and you’re “falling down the steps of the Met Gala,” which is weird because you’re not actually at the Met Gala.
This joke first started in 2015 when someone on the internet randomly decided that this mystery man in a white suit looked like Jason and tweeted that he fell down the steps of that year’s Met Gala. When it first surfaced, Jason himself tweeted that he wasn’t there and he was actually in L.A. at a rehearsal. “Lmao I’m at rehearsal in L.A. Fuq y’all! Lol,” he said on Instagram at the time. This then happened once again at the Met Gala in 2018, because of course it did.
Fast-forward to 2023 and people are STILL making this meme a thing, and now it’s spread to basically every awards show, from the Golden Globes to the Oscars right back to the 2022 Met Gala, then to the 2022 Grammy Awards and now to the 2023 Met Gala. Here’s a tweet that blessed (cursed?! IDK!) the timeline not too long ago:
This meme literally will not die. Thankfully, people are both in on the running joke (I mean, just look at that shoddy Photoshop work lol), and are starting to set the record straight on the interwebs and reminding people that this isn’t, in fact, Jason.
Ugh, glad we got this cleared up.
Senior Entertainment Editor
Emma Baty is the Senior Entertainment Editor at Cosmopolitan, where she shapes TV, movie and music coverage, writes celebrity profiles, edits stories across both print and digital, and generally obsesses over all things pop culture. Prior to this role, she worked as Cosmopolitan.com’s News Writer, writing celebrity news stories daily and covering live events like the Oscars. Originally from Grand Haven, Michigan, she currently lives in Brooklyn.