Gkay VS Fábio Porchat

Submission 638

Part of a series on Brazil. [View Related Entries]

Background

The Gkay VS Fábio Porchat fued comes from an incident on December 25th, 2022 where the Brazilian comedian Fábio Porchat^[1] was on TV Globo's performing an hommage to a late comedian at the Domingão com Huck^[2] program. During the tribute to presenter Jô Soares, who died in August of this year, Porchat recalled the interview given by Gkay^[3], a Brazilian sub-celebrity, on another late-night show, saying that if Jô was still alive he'd rather die than do this interview with her.

[This video has been removed]

Developments

On the same day, the Brazilian sub-celebrity Gessica Kayane Rocha de Vasconcelos, popularly known as Gkay, responded to the joke made by Fábio Porchat saying in a tweet (now deleted), "that a person preferred to die than interview me, you really have no idea how much that hurts me in a thousand places…"

Porchat's Response

After Gkay response to the joke, the subject became one of the trending topics on Brazilian Twitter,^[5] leading to Fábio Porchat posting an apology video on December 27th, 2022. However, the comedian said that the joke “wasn't humiliating anyone” or being distasteful about the late's interviewer Jô Soares's death. The video went viral on Twitter, reaching 5 million views and 285,000 likes in three days.

The comedian's response was widely spread on social media, as people were picking a side in the feud and creating memes about the situation. Some users claimed that Porchat created a new category for apology videos, now known as "that's exactly what I wanted to say and there's more," as @vida_jornalista^[4] explains in a tweet (seen below). The post reached 89,400 likes and 9,400 retweets in three days.

Online Reaction

As the feud became a trending topic and Porchat's response video went viral, social media users also started to dig up previous controversies involving the digital influencer Gkay. One video in particular got significant online attention, a podcast interview with the YouTuber Felipe Castanhari, in which he criticized Gkay and said that she should be afraid that her (bad) attitudes would be exposed. A clip from the interview was reuploaded to Twitter^[8] by @vaidesmaiar (seen below) and earned over 41,100 likes in less than a week.

As more memes and gossip surrounding Gkay were shared, she decided to deactivate her Twitter account.

The comedian's facial expressions during his "apology" video were turned into reaction images in memes in situations where the utmost honest opinion is needed. For example, @brucorradinih's tweet (now deleted) on December 28th, 2022, uses the comedian's image with the caption “Friend, can you give me your opinion as a psychologist?”

The comedian's video also started a TikTok trend in which people pretend they're asking for honest advice from a friend and show Porchat's face to express how serious they are. TikTok^[7] user @thebibliotec posted a video on December 28th, 2022, garnering 1.3 million views in one day (seen below, left). TikTok^[6] user @saymonrb also uploaded a similar video on the same day, receiving 352,000 views (below, right).