The man who hosted KDOC's "First Night" wants you to know he was in on the joke.
Days after the last morsels of confetti have been swept up from city streets, local L.A. station KDOC's evening of technical glitches, f-bombs and all-around mayhem remains an enduring topic of fascination on the Internet.
VIDEO: Jamie Kennedy Hosts New Year's Eve Broadcast Disaster
Now Jamie Kennedy, the evening's emcee -- who in a viral highlights video comes off equal parts befuddled and overwhelmed at the televised trainwreck unfurling around him -- has broken his silence on the telecast, telling The New York Times that the show, shot outside Hollywood's famed Chinese Theatre, was in fact "supposed to be like that."
"We wanted to make almost an anti-New Year’s Eve show, and the recipe calls for unexpected," the onetime host of The Jamie Kennedy Experiment explains. "We had an open bar for our guests, we were unrehearsed. It was not glamorous."
Kennedy says the mere fact that people are still discussing the show on Jan. 4 means he did something right, even if it looked terribly wrong.
"We wanted to make a stink. Did we know it was going to make this much of a stink? No. But if I had done this correctly, would I be talking to you right now? No. How many people are talking about a New Year’s special on the 4th? Carson Daly, Ryan Seacrest – no," Kennedy says.
As for an answer to the big question -- will they do it again? -- Kennedy assures that the show's sponsor, Commerce Casino, has "already signed up" for another edition. And he's already thinking about a lineup.
"I got a text from Marilyn Manson that says he wants to do next year," he says.
