Guess this girl wasn’t really on fire after all! Jimmy Kimmel set up a “Skype” call with Caitlin Heller, the young woman whose “haphazard twerking led to setting herself aflame,” on his show on Monday, Sept. 9 — but the interview ended with a surprising twist, and a couple of hearty laughs at the expense of the Internet community.
Kimmel, 45, kicked off the segment by introducing Heller, who was supposedly being broadcast into the studio from Kansas City, MO via satellite. The late night talk show host then proceeded to ask her a few questions about her twerking efforts gone awry.
“When you first put it online, did you have any idea how popular it was going to become?” Kimmel asked Heller.
“I had no clue. This is like, literally my first Youtube submission,” she replied, adding that the viral online clip cut abruptly because “it got a little intense.”
At that, in his first hint that the video was a set-up, Kimmel ducked behind a red curtain onstage to where Heller was sitting by a laptop in the studio.
The talk show host then good-naturedly suggested that they show the rest of the footage — in which Heller attempts to twerk against a door when her roommate comes in, knocking her into a table full of candles — which happens to include Kimmel himself.
In the previously “unaired” footage, Kimmel bursts into the room with a fire extinguisher (clad in a matching pink shirt) just as Heller starts rolling around on the couch with her yoga pants on fire and puts it out.
“To the conspiracy theorists on the Internet who thought the video was fake: You were right. It was fake. We made it up,” Kimmel said as the audience applauded. He then thanked Heller (real name: Daphne Avalon) for helping him to “deceive the world and hopefully put an end to twerking forever.”
“I’m also the guy who bit Charlie’s finger, by the way,” the funnyman added in a nod to another viral video.
