2024 NFL Honors host Keegan-Michael Key reminded viewers on Thursday night during his opening monologue about his hilarious NFL commercial with the “You Can't Make This Stuff Up” tagline that kicked off the 2023 season back in August.

The callback brought up an interesting question — are the plethora of non-sensical right wing conspiracy theories proliferating in the Republican Party these days (centered on the idea that the NFL is scripted) based on this satirical commercial?

The 2023 NFL's kickoff ad was called “The Table Read” and cleverly showcases a director, played by Keegan-Michael Key (of Key & Peele fame), and a slew of NFL stars identified as “actors”, along with a bunch of television writers, sitting around a table for a script read-through of the 2023 NFL season.

This is a bit of inside baseball, but a “table read” is the start of the production process on a TV show, where actors come in street clothes to sit around a table and read an episode's script for the first time out loud, to give the director, writers and creative executives a chance to hear how it sounds before run-throughs and rehearsals when wardrobe and sets will be involved.

The script in the ad is labelled “The 104th Season Of The NFL – The Script” and the joke centers on the NFL season being so entertaining last year, that it must have been scripted. The tagline to the ad reads “You can't make this stuff up” followed by the caption “The story begins September 7th.”

It's easy to see how a political party prone to fake news could have let something like this seep into their twisted subconscious psyche and let it percolate back up to the surface at a convenient moment.

This isn't intended so much as a judgement on the MAGA crowd — usually their bonkers, liberal-bashing conspiracy theories are pulled completely out of thin air with no attachment to reality whatsoever, so if this one is inspired by a joke that just went over their heads, that's at least a step in the right direction!

Whatever the source of the misinformation, it was nice to hear Keegan-Michael Key remind viewers of his “Table Read” NFL commercial — because a rewatching highlights just how comedic and absurd the idea that the NFL season is scripted really is. It also further exposes the unspoken truth that the agenda behind the Republican smear campaign is obviously to discredit a potential Democratic presidential endorsement of Joe Biden which may be forthcoming from the most popular celebrity on the planet at the moment, Taylor Swift. The cynical Republican conspiracy theory agenda doesn't really seem to be working however, as most Americans are having no problem shaking it off.