If there’s one thing Gayle King is going to do, it’s jump in on a good joke. On Sunday, the 69-year-old CBS Mornings anchor shared a video on Instagram of her pulling the viral oil rig prank on her friends Oprah Winfrey and Charles Barkley, whose reactions are vastly different with the same messages: hell no.
The oil rig prank is a simple one: call someone pretending that you’ve been offered a job in underwater welding. King tailors the prank for each phone call — when she calls Winfrey, she tells her that they’ve been pitched the opportunity to learn how to cap an oil rig with ExxonMobil for Adventures of Oprah and Gayle.
“No. I’m not interested in learning how to cap an oil rig,” Winfrey says concisely. When King asks her to approach the idea as “stepping outside your comfort zone,” Winfrey responds that learning how to cap an oil rig is “not something that I want to do in this lifetime, OK? It’s not on my list. Thank you for the opportunity!”
When King persists, Winfrey suggests that she “ask your other friend,” which leads the mother of two to Barkley.
Cut to her asking her King Charles co-host, who loudly answers, “F**k no!”
“I’m not going underwater, Gayle, they got sharks and s**t out there,” Barkley adds. “You don’t watch shows?”
Despite her reassurance, Barkley adamantly refuses, telling her it’s “not gonna happen.”
When King asks if “that your way of saying you’re going to think about it,” Barkley tells her yes, adding, “And I’ll tell you no again next week.”
King even calls her “favorite son,” William Bumpus Jr., and “favorite daughter” Kirby Bumpus, who are both a bit more gentle in letting their mother down about her new idea. Will even tries to brainstorm alternative ideas, including surfing!
Watch the hilarious reactions to King’s oil rig prank below.
While we won’t be seeing King and Winfrey attempt oil rig programs any time soon, the dynamic duo often venture out on extravagant trips together and share their stories with their followers on social media. Adventures With Oprah and Gayle could be right around the corner!
Recently, Winfrey and King shared the secret to their friendship, which has endured for nearly five decades, in an intimate conversation with The New York Times.
As most people know by now, Winfrey and King met when they worked at the same TV station in Baltimore, Maryland. And they have a snowstorm to thank for hypercharging that friendship. The story goes King couldn’t get home one night due to the inclement weather, and it was Winfrey who invited King to stay at her place that night.
They bonded like sisters, and the rest is history.
“We sort of became the gold standard for friendship,” Winfrey told the outlet. “I actually think that is deserved.”
King recalled how complete strangers walk up to her and introduce themselves in a very unique way.
“At the airport on Sunday, these two people walked up to me and said, ‘This is my Oprah. No, she’s my Gayle,'” King said. “Or I’ll be walking and someone will hand me their phone and say, ‘Hey, could you say hi to my Oprah?’ Oprah, you get that, too.”
“All the time,” Winfrey responded. “Still, people will always say, ‘This is my Gayle. ‘She’s my Gayle.'”
And their secret to an everlasting friendship? For starters, being brutally honest with each other.
“She is a blunt truth-teller,” King said of Winfrey. “Even if you don’t want to hear it.”
They also genuinely enjoy each other’s company, and apparently, they also share quasi-telepathic powers.
“Sometimes we’re both thinking, ‘I want to stab myself in the eye with a fork right now. Oh, my god. Why am I here?'” Winfrey said in reference to events she’s attended in the past. “A couple of times Gayle has said, ‘Should I hand you my fork?'”
During an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April 2021, Winfrey became emotional while discussing what King has meant to her all these years.
“I never had therapy — I had all my therapy on television in front of all of y’all — and what I realized is that Gayle was my regulation,” she told Barrymore. “It makes me want to cry now thinking about it. Every night after the show, I would come home, and I would have these sessions with Gayle where we talked about what happened on the show, or what didn’t happen on the show, and that was the way I kind of regulated myself. So, I would talk to Gayle before bed, and then I would be calmer.”
