Jimmy Kimmel Asks People if Obama Is a Muslim and It Tells You Everything About America

The late-night hosts asks if Obama is a Muslim.

By Seija Rankin Sep 04, 2015 5:31 PMTags

Do you ever watch something and then feel like the only response is an exhausted sigh? That's us right now. 

The culprit is Jimmy Kimmel's latest late-night sketch. On its face it's actually pretty funny, but it's also making us very depressed about the state of the country. The concept of the bit was two-fold: First the late-night host and his team hit the street in Hollywood to ask passerby a loaded question: Do they think that Barack Obama is a Muslim? It may seem ridiculous to still be entertaining this idea, but a recent poll actually showed that a majority of Republicans believe that he is, in fact, a Muslim. (Cue sigh again).

Then the studio audience was tasked with guessing each person's response based on only their name and hometown. Now we know what you're thinking: Holy typecasting! Hilariously, some of the audience's assumptions were spot-on—like when they overwhelmingly agreed that the guy decked out in head-to-toe Marines paraphernalia would answer "Yes."

But it was also a lesson in not jumping to conclusions. Several of the participants that audiences assumed would know the correct answer (based on their hometowns or just the way they look) turned out to also believe (incorrectly, obviously) that Obama is a Muslim.

And then there was the woman in the red-white-and-blue shirt who answered that the POTUS is "Christian Muslim...He's a Muslim but he's Christian Muslim." Two sighs for you, Lisa from Inglewood.

It taught us several things: One, that people living in Los Angeles are super quick to judge a person's intelligence just by the way they look or the fact that they're from "Middle America." (Which, we should point out, proved the audience wrong several times). And two, that it is extremely depressing how many people in this country still have completely no idea who our president really is. 

So let this be a final reminder for anyone who's a tad bit unsure: Just because someone has a slightly Muslim-sounding name, does not mean they are a Muslim. And that's the end of today's lesson; back to the laughs.