Michael Jackson Being AWKWARDLY Hilarious For 12 Minutes Straight! | HO!!!!
From prank-calling celebs to hiding behind doors at parties — he was awkward, sweet, and accidentally hilarious all at once.
Yeah, that wasn’t loud enough.
He said it twice, leaning into the microphone like it personally offended him, and the entire room already didn’t know where to look.
That was the thing about Michael Jackson—one second he’s sweet, soft-spoken, almost shy, and the next he’s accidentally humiliating someone on live television or making a grown interviewer question every life choice that led to that exact moment.
Nobody did it quite like him. Not Robin Williams with his manic energy, not Eddie Murphy with his sharp-tongued confidence. Michael was different. He didn’t try to be funny.
That’s what made it so devastating. He just existed, and the awkwardness rippled outward like a stone dropped into still water, and somehow, impossibly, everyone ended up laughing while also feeling vaguely guilty about it.
“I’m not gay,” he said once, apropos of absolutely nothing, and the interviewer just blinked.
Nobody had asked. Nobody was even thinking about it. But Michael felt the need to clarify, and now the entire clip lives forever on the internet, a perfect little time capsule of a man who operated on a completely different frequency than the rest of the human race.
He’d do things like that constantly. Random declarations. Sudden whispers. That voice—the soft, breathy, impossibly gentle voice that made everything sound like a secret—saying the most unhinged things imaginable while maintaining perfect eye contact.
—
“Come on, tell me. What have I done?”
The interviewer had laughed at something—maybe his accent, maybe the situation, maybe just the sheer surreal experience of sitting across from the most famous person on the planet—and Michael locked onto it like a heat-seeking missile. He needed to know. He wasn’t letting it go.
“No, I like your accent. I was laughing. You said—I’m going to ask you. You said I’m going to ask you.”
The woman tried to recover, tried to explain, tried to do literally anything other than drown in the gravity of Michael Jackson’s undivided attention. But it was too late. He was already leaning forward, already studying her face, already doing that thing where he made you feel like the only person in the universe while also making you desperately wish you were invisible.
“I like it,” he said.
And then, because he couldn’t help himself: “Can you do an English accent?”
“A bit,” she admitted. “Okay.”
“Nice to meet you,” Michael said, suddenly British, suddenly posh, suddenly doing something that made absolutely no sense in context but felt completely inevitable.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she replied, because what else could she do?
“Nice to meet a nice beautiful interview.”
He said it like it made perfect sense. Like those words had always belonged together. Like “beautiful interview” was a completely normal thing to call a person. And somewhere in the control room, the producer put their head in their hands and laughed so hard they cried, because nobody—literally nobody—could be awkwardly hilarious quite like Michael Jackson.
—
The thing about Michael was the timing. It was always the timing. He’d wait just a beat too long, or answer a fraction of a second too early, or hold a silence until it became its own kind of joke. He understood rhythm the way fish understand water—it wasn’t intellectual, it was instinctual. He’d spent his entire life thinking in beats, in measures, in the spaces between notes. And that sense of timing didn’t turn off when the music stopped. It followed him everywhere, into every interview, every conversation, every random encounter with a celebrity who had no idea what they were in for.
“I’m sorry,” he’d say, mid-sentence, to absolutely no one. “Just pretend I’m not doing it.”
What was “it”? Nobody knew. He never explained. He just kept talking, leaving behind a trail of confused producers and bewildered fans who spent the next forty-eight hours trying to figure out what exactly they’d just witnessed.
—
There was a short film he did called *Ghosts*, which had been picked up by, uh, Beatrice—or maybe it was Beatrix, the interviewer stumbled over the name, and Michael just watched. He didn’t correct her. He didn’t help. He just watched, with those enormous eyes, like he was observing a nature documentary about people who weren’t quite sure how to pronounce things. The silence stretched. The interviewer kept talking, trying to fill the void, trying to pretend she wasn’t drowning. Michael smiled. The cameraman later said it was the longest thirty seconds of his professional life.
At this age, someone asked him once. You’re twenty-four?
“Twenty-four,” Michael confirmed.
Thirty? they tried again, because he looked timeless, ageless, like a photograph that had been left in the sun too long.
“Thirty,” he said, nodding.
No, wait—”I’m twenty-four.”
He’d done it again. He’d agreed with both options, contradicted himself in the span of three seconds, and somehow made it seem like the interviewer was the one who wasn’t paying attention. That was his superpower. He could make you feel crazy without ever raising his voice, without ever breaking that soft, gentle smile, without ever doing anything overtly aggressive or rude. He just… existed in his own reality, and if your reality didn’t quite line up, well, that sounded like a you problem.
—
As huge as Michael Jackson was—and he was huge, the biggest, the kind of famous that doesn’t exist anymore, the kind where entire countries stopped functioning when he released a new video—at the end of the day, he was just a big kid. A grown man who never quite figured out how to be a grown man, who still found joy in the dumbest stuff, who prank-called celebrities from hotel rooms because he was bored and lonely and thought it would be funny.
Yeah. You heard that right. Prank calls.
Russell Crowe found this out the hard way. Years later, someone asked him about it, and he just shook his head like he still couldn’t quite believe it had happened.
“What was the thing with Michael Jackson?” the interviewer asked. “This is such an odd story.”
Russell laughed—that big, rumbling, slightly embarrassed laugh of a man who has been asked about weird celebrities approximately ten thousand times but never about this. “Oh, he just got into the habit of—wherever I was staying, he’d just call the hotel and ask for my room and put on funny voices.”
He paused, letting that sink in.
“And actually, yeah—I know, I know—I’d never met him, you know?”
Think about that for a second. Michael Jackson, the most recognizable face on planet Earth, the man who couldn’t go to the grocery store without causing a riot, would call hotel switchboards and ask for Russell Crowe’s room and then do bits. Funny voices. Characters. Just a guy, calling another guy he’d never met, to tell him jokes in a silly accent. And Russell Crowe, who had no idea who was on the other end of the line, probably hung up thinking, “Well, that was weird,” and went back to whatever Russell Crowe does when he’s not being prank-called by the King of Pop.
—
Imagine being in a car with Michael Jackson. Just a car, just driving somewhere, normal people activities. And then he starts mimicking every sound around him. The turn signal—click-click-click, he’d do it perfectly, pitch-perfect, like he’d been practicing for months. The windshield wipers—squeak-squeak, rhythmically, finding the beat. The engine, the tires on the asphalt, the random honk from somewhere behind them, all of it, everything, he’d absorb it and reflect it back in real-time, a human mirror made of sound. Someone once asked him about it, and he just shrugged like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“What’s going to the 360?” he’d say randomly, apropos of nothing, and everyone in the car would just look at each other like, did he just say that? He did. He said that. And nobody knew what it meant, least of all Michael himself, probably.
—
Things got unintentionally hilarious at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This was a big deal, a formal event, cameras everywhere, the who’s who of music history all in one room. And Michael Jackson became very particular about the camera angles.
“Now we are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” someone said. “Say that again.”
“Yeah,” Michael replied.
“Say that again. Where? Where?”
“What?”
“Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
“On the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
He was doing it again. He was making it weird. The interviewer tried to reset, tried to get a clean take, tried to pretend this wasn’t happening in front of two hundred of the most important people in the music industry.
“So, whenever you call our name—”
“I don’t like that angle,” Michael interrupted, pointing at one of the cameras. “I like this one.”
Just like that. No explanation. No apology. Just a man who knew exactly which side of his face looked best and wasn’t going to let some Hall of Fame ceremony mess that up. The cameraman panicked. The director started shouting. Michael smiled his soft, mysterious smile and waited for everyone else to catch up to his reality.
—
The moment Michael Jackson realized the cameras were snapping every time he moved, he immediately started messing with the photographers. This was at an event in Japan—something about attractions, someone was getting blinded by the flash, it was chaos—and Michael, instead of just standing there like a normal celebrity, decided to play. He’d move his hand an inch, wait for the click-click-click of twenty cameras firing simultaneously, then move it back. Click-click-click. Then shake his head once. Click-click-click. Then tilt it the other way. Click-click-click. He turned it into a game, a one-man symphony of shutter sounds, and the photographers, poor souls, had no choice but to keep shooting because this was Michael Jackson and every frame was worth money and maybe, just maybe, the next one would be the shot.
He knew what he was doing. He’d done it a thousand times before. The man had been photographed since he was eight years old—he understood the rhythm of a camera the way other people understood the rhythm of their own heartbeat. And he used that knowledge for evil, or at least for mischief, because why wouldn’t you?
—
Michael Jackson definitely had his own unique way of saying thank you. Normal people say “thanks” or “I appreciate you” or maybe send a card. Michael made entire videos. In appreciation for working on the “Black or White” short film, he gathered everyone together and said, with complete sincerity, “We like to say thank you and we love you and we think—”
He paused. He looked around the room. He was searching for the right words, the right energy, the right way to express a gratitude so vast it couldn’t possibly fit into normal human language.
“And John—wonderful job because—”
He never finished the sentence. He just trailed off, nodded once, and smiled. And somehow, impossibly, everyone in the room felt genuinely thanked. That was the magic of him. He didn’t need to finish his sentences. He didn’t need to make logical sense. He just needed to exist in your presence for a few seconds, and you walked away feeling like you’d been touched by something bigger than yourself.
—
Eddie Murphy’s comedy timing mixed with Michael Jackson’s awkwardness was always going to be hilarious. These two together—one of the funniest men alive and the most famously weird man alive—created moments that felt almost scripted, except nobody could have written this stuff. Eddie would be doing his thing, riffing, making jokes, controlling the room like he always did, and Michael would just… hover. Nearby. Watching. Waiting for his moment.
“I can’t wait,” Eddie said once, demonstrating something, trying to get Michael to follow along. “It ain’t working. It go like—bend down.”
And Michael, sweet, earnest, completely literal Michael, bent down.
“First,” Michael said later, during some joint interview or appearance, “I like to thank—” He pointed at Eddie. “He said—” And then Michael started pulling up like he was working for Eddie, like Eddie was the boss and Michael was the employee, and it was so wrong and so weird and so funny that Eddie just lost it.
“Hey, that started to do it too!” Eddie said, laughing. “I was like, ‘Yes, Michael.'” And then, quieter, to himself: “Wait, what am I doing?”
That was the effect Michael had on people. He made you forget who you were. He made you join his weird little world without even realizing it, and then you’d catch yourself doing something ridiculous—bending down for no reason, mimicking a sound effect, saying “beautiful interview” like it made sense—and you’d think, “What has happened to me?”
—
“Can we just do it again without the negative?” someone asked him once. “Without saying that you don’t like the tour? Just because—”
“I don’t like it though,” Michael said.
Simple. Honest. Devastating.
“I know,” the person said, trying to salvage the moment, “but you say this—”
“I go through hell touring,” Michael explained. And there it was—the real answer, the honest answer, the thing he’d probably been wanting to say for years but had been too polite to voice. “I go through hell touring.”
The person tried again: “I’ll make it positive then.”
“Yeah,” Michael said, not convinced.
“It’s just—”
“Well, you know the truth,” Michael said, and suddenly the room got very quiet. Because yeah. They did know the truth. Everyone knew. The grueling schedules, the endless travel, the physical toll, the emotional exhaustion—touring had nearly killed him more than once. And here he was, being asked to pretend he loved it, to lie for the camera, to perform happiness like he’d performed so many other things in his life.
“Yeah,” he said again, softer this time. “And action.”
“Michael—”
“I love to tour,” he said, and everyone in the room knew he was lying, and he knew they knew, and somehow that made it even funnier and even sadder all at once.
“You guys want—” someone started, but Michael had already moved on, already refocused, already decided that this particular moment was over and it was time for the next thing.
—
Next up, Michael Jackson started testing his camera, and things got unintentionally hilarious. He was just messing around, just trying to see if the thing worked, just being a guy with a piece of equipment and no real plan for how to use it. But because he was Michael Jackson, even that became a performance.
“Frank,” he said to someone off-camera, “I’m just trying to see if this thing works.”
He pointed the lens at himself. He studied his reflection. He did that thing where he seemed to be looking at something far away, something nobody else could see.
“One, two.”
He paused. He tilted his head. He smiled slightly, like he’d just told himself a private joke.
“I’m not a narcissist. Just trying this mirror effect.”
Which was, of course, exactly what a narcissist would say. But he wasn’t being a narcissist—he was being a performer, an artist, someone who had spent his entire life looking at his own reflection and asking, “Is this right? Is this enough? Is this what they want to see?” The line between confidence and insecurity blurred until you couldn’t tell which was which. He was testing the camera, sure. But he was also testing himself, testing the world, testing the endless question of whether he was still the person everyone expected him to be.
“Testing the camera,” he repeated, like a mantra. “Seeing how well it works.”
He looked up. “Go ahead.”
“What?” someone asked, confused.
But Michael didn’t answer. He just kept looking at his reflection, at the camera, at the strange in-between space where performance ends and reality begins. And somewhere in the background, a producer checked their watch and wondered if this was going to make the final cut.
(It did.)
—
Chris Tucker tells the best Michael Jackson stories. Not because Chris is a better storyteller than everyone else—though he is good, really good, with that fast-talking, high-energy delivery that makes everything sound urgent and important—but because Chris actually spent time with Michael. Real time. Not just interviews or award shows or industry events, but actual friendship hours, hanging out, being weird together in private where nobody else could see.
“Both of us like going to the movies,” Chris explained once, leaning into the memory like it was still happening. “So, we go to the movies, but it’s hard because Michael got to sneak in right before it start.”
He paused for effect, because he’s a comedian and he knows how to build a moment.
“So Michael come in there with a ninja suit on. He’s hiding. All black.”
The audience laughed, because the image was ridiculous—Michael Jackson, the most recognizable man alive, dressed like a ninja, sneaking into a movie theater like he was in a spy movie instead of just trying to watch the new blockbuster without causing a riot.
“I’m sitting there,” Chris continued, picking up speed, “and I’m like, where’s Michael? I turn around—he’s like—” Chris dropped his voice to a whisper, a perfect Michael impression, soft and breathy: “Hey, Chris.”
Chris mimed jumping out of his seat. “I’m like, ‘Oh, man. How long you been here?'”
Michael’s voice again, even softer: “About five minutes.”
The audience lost it. Five minutes. He’d been standing there, in the dark, in a ninja suit, just watching Chris watch the movie, waiting for the perfect moment to announce his presence. That was Michael in a nutshell. He didn’t do things the normal way. He couldn’t. Normal was boring. Normal was for people who didn’t have paparazzi hiding in every bush. Normal was for people who could walk down the street without being mobbed. Michael’s whole life was a workaround, a series of creative solutions to problems most people would never have to face. And sometimes those solutions were hilarious.
—
Things got hilariously awkward when Michael Jackson started teasing his wife mid-interview. This was during the *HIStory* era, when he was married to Lisa Marie Presley, and they were doing some joint appearance, some conversation about music and marriage and whatever else people wanted to know about the most famous couple on Earth.
“You know what I mean?” Michael was saying, talking about some song or some sound or some production technique. “So, I’ll take that and use that as the main foundation for the track and build all the sounds around that. You know what I’m saying?”
Lisa Marie nodded. The interviewer nodded. Everyone was being very professional, very serious, very focused on the art of music-making.
“So whatever the future,” the interviewer said, trying to wrap up that segment, “the music will always be inside the man who says soon he’ll be back where he’s most at home—”
And then Michael did something. A look. A whisper. Something directed at Lisa Marie that nobody else quite caught. And Lisa Marie, who had been composed and professional up until that moment, suddenly cracked. She started laughing. Not a polite, interview-appropriate laugh, but a real one, a surprised one, the laugh of someone who just heard their spouse say something completely unhinged in public and couldn’t believe they had to keep a straight face.
“What?” the interviewer asked, clearly lost.
“Nothing,” Lisa Marie said, still laughing. “He’s just—”
Michael smiled his innocent smile, the one that said “I have no idea what you’re talking about” while also saying “I definitely know what I did and I would do it again.”
The interview never fully recovered after that. The tension was gone, replaced by this weird, intimate energy, like you were watching a private moment that wasn’t meant for public consumption. Michael had done that thing he always did—he’d punctured the formality, broken the fourth wall, reminded everyone that this was all just performance and none of it really mattered. And somehow, impossibly, it made the whole thing better.
—
Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder were recording together. Think about that for a second. Two of the most talented musicians in human history, in the same room, making music together. It should have been transcendent. It should have been magical. It should have been the kind of creative collaboration that people write books about.
And it was. But it was also really, really funny.
They were working on something—a song, probably, though the exact details have been lost to time—when Michael tried to show Stevie something. He reached out, maybe to point at a lyric sheet or indicate a section of the recording or demonstrate some visual element of the arrangement. And then, about halfway through the gesture, he suddenly remembered.
Stevie Wonder is blind.
The realization hit Michael like a physical thing. He stopped mid-motion, his hand frozen in the air, and his face went through about seventeen different emotions in the span of two seconds. Confusion. Embarrassment. The dawning horror of someone who just did something incredibly stupid in front of a legend.
“About to get stinking now,” someone said, probably trying to fill the awkward silence.
“I can just punch that part in,” Stevie said, because Stevie is a professional and has been dealing with sighted people’s weirdness his entire life.
“Excuse me,” Michael said, and his voice was higher than usual, more breathless, the voice of a man who desperately wants to be anywhere else.
“Great.”
“Oh, did you go home?” Stevie asked, because he couldn’t see that Michael was still standing right there, frozen, dying inside.
“Is it?”
The room got very quiet. Somewhere, a producer was definitely writing this down for the memoir they’d publish in twenty years.
“I just ran off, didn’t I?” Michael said finally, and he laughed—that soft, self-deprecating laugh that said “I am aware that I am a ridiculous person and I have made peace with it.”
Stevie just shook his head and smiled. He’d seen it all. He’d been in the music business since he was a kid. He’d watched Motown grow from a tiny Detroit storefront into a global empire. He’d worked with everyone—and he meant everyone—and he’d learned that sometimes the best thing you could do when someone made things weird was just to keep playing. The music would cover the awkwardness. It always did.
—
“Hi, my name is Michael Jackson.”
He said it four times in a row, each time slightly different, each time with a different inflection, like he was trying on versions of himself and seeing which one fit best.
“My name is Michael Jackson.”
The first one was soft, almost shy. The second one was a little louder, a little more confident. The third one was weird—he stretched out the syllables, made it almost musical, turned his own name into a melody.
“My name is Michael Jackson.”
And then, because he couldn’t help himself: “You’re the real Michael Jackson. Please step forward.”
He was talking to himself. Or maybe he was talking to some imagined version of himself, some doppelgänger who had shown up to steal his identity. Or maybe he was just bored and saying words and seeing what happened. With Michael, it was always impossible to tell. That was the magic and the frustration of him. He lived in a world of his own making, and he didn’t always bother to explain the rules.
—
Michael Jackson once hilariously mimicked a fan saying “I love you.” This happened at some event, some public appearance, some moment where the crowd was going wild and someone in the front row screamed those three words at the top of their lungs. Most celebrities would smile, wave, maybe say “I love you too” and move on. Michael did something else entirely.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes.”
He looked at the fan. He studied her face. He leaned in slightly, like he was about to share a secret.
“What’d you say?” he asked, even though he’d definitely heard her.
“I love you,” she said again, louder this time, almost crying.
And Michael—this is the part that kills me—Michael looked at her and did this thing with his face. He scrunched it up, made it playful, made it almost mocking but not mean, just… silly. Like he was a little kid and she’d just said something embarrassing and he was going to tease her about it.
“I love you too,” he said finally, but the way he said it was so weird, so off, so completely unlike any normal human interaction, that the crowd didn’t know whether to laugh or cheer or just stand there in confused silence.
(Most of them cheered. Some of them laughed. A few of them definitely spent the next week wondering what exactly they’d witnessed.)
—
“You’re getting close to your fortieth birthday,” an interviewer said once. “How is the way you feel about music?”
Michael stared at her. Not an angry stare, not an intimidating stare, just… a stare. The stare of someone who has been asked approximately forty-seven million questions in his life and is trying to decide if this one is worth answering.
“I did not circle that question,” he said finally.
The interviewer blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“You circled some questions,” Michael explained, very slowly, very patiently, like he was talking to a child. “I answered them. I did not circle this question.”
The interviewer looked down at her notes. She looked back up at Michael. She opened her mouth. She closed it. She had absolutely no idea how to respond to that, because who circles questions? Who prepares for an interview by literally circling the topics they’re willing to discuss and refusing to engage with anything else? Michael Jackson, that’s who. The most famous person in the world, the man who had sold more records than almost anyone in history, and he treated interviews like a multiple-choice test where he got to choose which questions counted.
“Okay,” the interviewer said finally, because what else could she say? “Sorry.”
Michael nodded. He’d made his point. He hadn’t been rude, exactly—he was never rude, not really—but he’d been clear. There were boundaries. There were rules. And if you didn’t follow them, he would simply… stop. Not dramatically, not angrily. Just softly, gently, irrevocably stop. And you would be left holding your microphone and your circled questions and your rapidly crumbling professional composure, wondering how you’d ended up here.
—
Michael Jackson made this video for Will Vinton—the claymation genius behind the California Raisins—and it’s honestly one of the funniest things ever. The video exists somewhere, probably on YouTube, definitely in the archives of people who collect weird celebrity artifacts, and it captures Michael in a way almost nothing else does: relaxed, playful, genuinely amused.
“He’s so cool,” Michael said, talking about someone—Will, maybe, or someone else in the room. “I’m fortunate that he’s here. And he’s much too cool for like one of these.”
He gestured vaguely at… everything. The camera. The set. The whole production.
“Okay,” he said, shifting gears. “I feel like James Bond.”
“You are,” someone said off-camera.
“Yes.”
“Welcome to the making of ‘Black or White,'” the person continued.
“Ta-da,” Michael said, and did a little jazz hands thing that was so earnest and so silly and so completely Michael that you couldn’t help but smile.
“Well, after I say ‘Black or White’ jingle like that, sir—”
He paused, reconsidered, and started over: “Welcome. Welcome to the making of ‘Black or White.'”
“Thank you,” the person said.
Michael nodded. He looked pleased with himself. He’d done it. He’d said the thing correctly. The world could now continue spinning.
—
To his nephews, Michael Jackson wasn’t the King of Pop. He wasn’t a legend. He wasn’t the most famous person on Earth. He was just Uncle Michael—the guy they kept tossing into the pool.
“That’s my cousin Elijah,” one of them explained, pointing at someone in an old home video. “Just push me in the pool.”
The video showed exactly that: a kid running up to Michael and shoving him into the water. Michael went in with a surprised yelp, came up sputtering, and was immediately pushed back in by another nephew.
“That’s Levon, my other cousin. In the red.”
“No,” Michael said, laughing, trying to climb out. “I dried up—”
They pushed him right back in.
“Look, look, look, look, look,” one of the nephews said, getting excited. “LOOK.”
The video showed Michael trying to climb out again, and this time—this time—he was doing something with his legs, some kind of dance move even while scrambling for purchase on the pool’s edge.
“The police pulled him out,” someone said, and the nephews all started laughing.
“What was he doing?” the interviewer asked, because even they were confused now.
“He was doing a Jackson dance.”
“He was doing all my—every time he starts, the police pull him out every time. He could never get on a roll.”
The image is incredible: Michael Jackson, the greatest dancer of his generation, the man who invented moves that people are still trying to copy decades later, unable to complete a single dance because his nephews kept shoving him into a pool and the police—why were there police?—kept pulling him out. It’s the kind of story that sounds fake but isn’t, the kind of thing that could only happen to someone whose life was so strange that reality itself started to bend around it.
“Poor guy,” the interviewer said.
“Yeah,” the nephew agreed, still laughing. “You guys—”
He shook his head. There was no finishing that sentence. Some things were too weird to explain.
—
The look on Michael Jackson’s face after his wife said this was priceless. They were doing another interview, another public appearance, another moment where the world got to watch two famous people try to have a normal conversation while cameras recorded their every micro-expression.
“Your fans had one question they most wanted to ask of you,” the interviewer said.
And then Lisa Marie—sweet, brave, slightly chaotic Lisa Marie—said it: “Do we have sex?”
The room went absolutely silent. You could hear someone breathing. You could hear the faint hum of the studio lights. You could hear, probably, Michael Jackson’s soul briefly leaving his body.
“We have you,” the interviewer said, trying to recover, trying to pretend this was a normal thing that had just happened.
“She didn’t ask,” Michael said, and his voice was so quiet, so strained, so clearly desperate to be anywhere else.
“I won’t ask,” Lisa Marie said, and she was smiling—she was definitely smiling, the traitor—because she knew exactly what she’d done and she was enjoying it way too much.
“Okay.”
“You don’t know what it was going to be,” the interviewer said, trying to help, trying to throw Michael a lifeline.
“Is that what you were going to ask?” Michael asked, looking at his wife with an expression that said “I love you but also I am going to die right now.”
Lisa Marie just shrugged. The smile didn’t leave her face.
“Let’s play just a minute or two,” the interviewer said, clearly trying to move on. “Let’s play one or two.”
Michael nodded. He was still staring at his wife. He was still processing. He was still, somewhere deep inside, wondering what exactly he’d signed up for when he agreed to marry the daughter of Elvis Presley.
The tape kept rolling. The interview continued. But that moment—that perfect, frozen, horrified second where Michael Jackson realized his wife was about to ask about their sex life on national television—lives forever. Someone clipped it and put it on the internet, and millions of people have watched it, and every single one of them has thought the same thing: “Yep. That’s the face of a man who just remembered that cameras exist.”
—
Mike Tyson meeting Michael Jackson for the first time was about as awkward as it gets. Tyson was at the height of his career—”bad,” he said, “at the height of my career bad”—which meant he was terrifying. The most feared man in boxing. A heavyweight champion who knocked people out before they even knew what hit them. And there he was, standing in some room somewhere, trying to figure out how to approach Michael Jackson.
“There’s really nobody there but just me and him,” Tyson remembered. “And he’s just waiting for the car. And it was a truck, I believe. And he’s just looking—people coming over from the band and back—”
Tyson tried to get closer. He wanted to say something. He wanted to meet the man, the legend, the musician who had been the soundtrack to his entire life.
“And then he turns around,” Tyson said, “and he says, ‘Where do I know you from?'”
Tyson paused. He let that sink in.
“I’m at the height of my career. Bad.”
“Do I know you from somewhere?” Michael had asked, completely sincere, completely oblivious to the fact that he was talking to one of the most famous athletes on the planet.
“No,” Tyson said he replied. “No. I just came to show really yours.”
“Okay.”
That was it. That was the whole interaction. The baddest man on the planet, the heavyweight champion of the world, reduced to saying “I just came to show really yours” to a man who didn’t recognize him. And Michael just said “okay” and went back to waiting for his truck, completely unaware that he’d just broken Mike Tyson’s brain.
“Oh my god,” the interviewer said when Tyson finished the story.
“Yeah,” Tyson said, still sounding slightly dazed about it, decades later.
—
This is Michael Jackson’s foot. Now, what very few people know—and by “very few people,” I mean “almost everyone who wasn’t in Michael’s immediate circle”—is that Michael Jackson is extremely ticklish. Not just a little ticklish. Not the kind of ticklish where you giggle politely and then ask people to stop. The kind of ticklish where you lose all control of your body and make sounds that no human being should ever make.
“Okay,” someone said in a video that has since become legendary. “Watch.”
The camera focused on Michael’s foot. Just a foot. A bare foot, resting on something, completely innocent, completely unaware of what was about to happen.
“Foot,” the person said. “Michael. No.”
Michael was already squirming, already anticipating, already trying to pull away even though nothing had happened yet.
“Watch,” the person said again. “Watch.”
And then they touched his foot. Just a light touch, just a little tickle, just a small gesture that should not have produced the reaction it produced. Michael lost it. He shrieked—actually shrieked, a high-pitched sound that belonged in a horror movie or a cartoon or both—and jerked his leg away like he’d been electrocuted. He was laughing and gasping and trying to say something and failing completely, and the person who had tickled him was laughing too, because how could you not? This was Michael Jackson. The King of Pop. Reduced to a giggling puddle because someone touched his foot.
“Michael,” the person said, still laughing. “Michael, watch—”
“No,” Michael managed to say, still trying to recover. “No more—”
But it was too late. The video was already recording. The moment was already preserved. And somewhere in heaven—or wherever he is now—Michael is probably still trying to explain to the angels that no, really, his feet are extremely sensitive and this is not funny and please stop laughing.
—
Out of all of Eddie Murphy’s Michael Jackson stories, this movie night at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house might be the funniest. Picture it: Sammy Davis Jr.—the legendary entertainer, the member of the Rat Pack, the man who could sing and dance and act and do basically everything—hosting a movie night at his house. And Michael Jackson is there. Of course Michael Jackson is there. Where else would he be?
“Michael Jackson would be there,” Eddie explained, already laughing at the memory. “He watched *Cocoon* there.”
He paused. The audience waited.
“He was behind the door at first, because there were too many people. Too many people in the room. He was hiding behind the door.”
Eddie demonstrated, miming someone pressed flat against a wall, trying to make themselves invisible. “I said, ‘Eddie, come.’ I went behind the door—”
He acted it out, sneaking over to join Michael in his hiding spot. “And then we were standing behind the door, and I was like—” Eddie lowered his voice to a whisper: “‘What’s with all the people in there?'”
He looked at the audience. They were already losing it.
“These two are—” Eddie shook his head, unable to finish the sentence because he was laughing too hard.
Think about that. Two of the most famous people in the world—Eddie Murphy, the biggest movie star on the planet, and Michael Jackson, the biggest musician on the planet—hiding behind a door at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house because there were too many people in the room. Not because they were in danger. Not because they were avoiding paparazzi. Just because… there were too many people. And that was overwhelming. And behind the door was safer. And if that meant they both had to stand there like two kids who’d been caught stealing cookies, well, that was a price they were willing to pay.
“No way,” someone said in the audience.
“Yes way,” Eddie said. “Yes way.”
—
Michael Jackson got not one but two of the exact same water guns for Christmas. The same kind. Identical. Two of them. Because one water gun is fun, but two water guns is—what? More fun? More ridiculous? More evidence that Michael’s brain worked differently than everyone else’s?
“This is a Super Soaker,” Michael said in the video, examining the gift like a scientist studying a new species. “I can feel it until I want a sport. I want a squirt machine gun.”
She—someone, a woman, probably a family member or friend—was snatching presents away from him, trying to keep some order, trying to prevent the Christmas morning chaos from spiraling completely out of control.
“Say hi, Lou,” someone said. “Let them see your beautiful ears.”
“Hi, Lou,” Michael said obediently, and then went back to his water guns, already planning the mischief he would cause with them.
There was something so sweet about that video. Michael wasn’t performing for the camera—or if he was, he’d forgotten about it. He was just a guy on Christmas morning, excited about his presents, wanting to play with his new toys, completely unaware that millions of people would eventually watch this and think, “Yeah. That’s the most normal he’s ever looked.” The water guns were dumb. Getting two of the same one was weirder than just getting one. But he was happy. Genuinely, purely, childishly happy. And in a life that contained so much darkness, so much pain, so much isolation, those moments of simple joy mattered more than almost anything else.
—
And then there was the time Michael Jackson got drunk on his birthday. This is one of those stories that sounds fake until you see the footage, and then you see the footage and you still can’t believe it’s real. Michael Jackson—the man who barely drank, who was famously careful about what he put in his body, who seemed to exist on a diet of pure oxygen and fairy dust—got drunk. And suddenly everything coming out of his mouth became comedy gold.
He was at some party, some celebration, some gathering of friends and family, and he’d had more than he should have. The result was… loose. Michael was loose. He was giggly. He was saying things without thinking, which was already unusual for him—most of the time, every word out of his mouth felt carefully considered, like he’d run it through a filter before letting it escape. But not tonight. Tonight, the filter was off.
“Aaron Carter,” he said, pointing at someone. “Nick Carter, come on up here.”
He was slurring. Just a little. Just enough to be noticeable.
“I embarrass him,” Michael said, and giggled. “Thank you so much. I love you.”
He spotted a cake. A birthday cake. His birthday cake, probably, since it was his birthday.
“Oh, this is a happy birthday cake,” he said, reaching for it.
Someone started taking it away.
“Wait,” Michael said, suddenly serious. “Where are you taking the cake?”
He looked genuinely confused, genuinely concerned, like the cake had betrayed him by allowing itself to be removed from his presence. The people around him were laughing—not at him, exactly, but at the situation, at the absurdity of Michael Jackson getting drunk and becoming protective over a cake.
The footage is out there, if you know where to look. And everyone who sees it has the same reaction: “Wow. He really is just a person, isn’t he?” It’s disorienting, seeing someone so famous, so iconic, so larger-than-life, reduced to a drunk guy at a party who really wants his cake back. But that’s the thing about Michael—he contained multitudes. He was the King of Pop and a weirdo and a genius and a mess and a child and a man and sometimes, on special occasions, a slightly drunk guy who didn’t want anyone to take his dessert.
—
Magic Johnson also fell victim to Michael Jackson’s prank calls. Remember the prank calls? The ones where Michael would put on funny voices and call random celebrities’ hotel rooms? Magic got hit with those, and his story about it is absolutely incredible.
“So, I get a call,” Magic said, already smiling at the memory. “And this voice says—”
Magic dropped his voice, did an impression of the voice he’d heard on the other end of the line: “Magic.”
He paused for effect.
“I did not see the voice coming,” he admitted.
The voice on the phone said, “I want to talk to you.”
“So I hung the phone up,” Magic said.
“You hung up?” the interviewer asked.
“Yes. I hung up.”
Magic had no idea who he was talking to. He just heard some weird voice saying his name, saying “I want to talk to you,” and his natural instinct was to hang up. Which is, honestly, what most people would do. If a stranger calls you and says “Magic, I want to talk to you” in a strange voice, you hang up. That’s normal behavior.
“So the phone rang two minutes later,” Magic continued.
“Funnier,” someone said.
“This voice says—” Magic did the impression again: “Magic. This is Michael Jackson.”
Magic paused. He let the room absorb the absurdity of that moment.
“I said, ‘This is not Michael Jackson.'”
He said it like it was obvious. Like of course the person on the phone wasn’t Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson doesn’t call people. Michael Jackson is off being Michael Jackson somewhere. He’s not sitting in a hotel room doing a weird voice and asking to talk to Magic Johnson.
“So I hung the phone up again,” Magic said.
The interviewer was losing it. “You hung up on Michael Jackson?”
“I hung up,” Magic confirmed. And then, because the story wasn’t over: “Quick sand.”
“What?”
“Quick sand,” Magic said again, laughing now. “I’ll get quick.”
“They’re burning,” someone said.
“Bury him. Quicks—” Magic stopped, corrected himself. “Applehead.”
“Quicksand,” the interviewer said, trying to help.
“No,” Magic said. “He said—”
And then Magic did the voice again, the Michael voice, the one that had called him twice and been hung up on twice: “Quicksand.”
Magic shook his head, still laughing. “He said ‘quicksand’ in that voice, and I hung up again, and he called back and said—”
But the story trailed off, because at that point, everyone was laughing too hard to continue. Michael Jackson, the biggest star in the world, had called Magic Johnson’s hotel room multiple times, doing a weird voice, saying random words like “quicksand” and “applehead,” and been hung up on every single time. And instead of getting frustrated or offended, he just… kept calling back. Kept trying. Kept hoping that eventually, Magic would recognize his voice and realize it wasn’t a prank—or maybe it was a prank, but a friendly one, a weird one, the kind of prank only Michael Jackson would think to pull.
—
The thing about all these stories—the prank calls and the pool pushes and the drunk birthday cakes and the hiding behind doors—is that they add up to a picture of a person who was fundamentally, deeply strange. Not in a scary way. Not in a threatening way. Just… different. Operating on a different frequency, guided by different instincts, living in a world that most of us will never understand.
But here’s the thing about strange people: they’re often the most interesting ones. The ones who make life worth living. The ones who remind us that normal is overrated, that weird is wonderful, that awkward can be hilarious if you’re willing to laugh along.
Michael Jackson was all of those things. He was awkwardly hilarious for twelve minutes straight—and for twelve hours, and twelve days, and twelve years. He was a walking contradiction, a bundle of nervous energy and quiet confidence, a man who could command a stadium of fifty thousand people but couldn’t figure out how to have a normal conversation with an interviewer. He was the King of Pop and a big kid who got tossed into pools by his nephews. He was a legend and a weirdo and a genius and a mess and everything in between.
And somewhere, right now, in whatever form he exists in now, he’s probably still doing it. Still calling people in funny voices. Still hiding behind doors when there are too many people in the room. Still making everyone around him slightly uncomfortable in the most delightful way possible.
Applehead, indeed.