Pickleball is one of those neo-sports that seems to have infected every sleepy suburban community all at once, spreading with its loud rhythmic thwacking sounds and tiny paddle wielders with unstoppable enthusiasm. Where did it come from? No one knows. It is the kudzu of casual sports. It’s also the basis for the latest celebrity competition on CBS.
According to The Wrap, Stephen Colbert will host the special with Dierks Bentley, Will Ferrell, Emma Watson, Daniel Dae Kim, Max Greenfield, Luis Guzman, Sugar Ray Leonard, Tig Notaro and Kelly Rowland among those competing for pickleball immortality. It’s for charity (Comic Relief), so it’s tough to rag too hard on it, but nonetheless it’s maybe a signal that we’ve reached the end, full stop, of culture itself.
“If you love pickleball and you love celebrities and you love helping people, you’re going to love watching these celebrities help people by playing pickleball,” Colbert said in a statement.
It was previously thought that we’d reached the end of culture with the immense popularity of Lip Sync Battle, but it turns out we had just a little bit more art to squeeze through the sieve to turn into content. Pickled will premiere November 17th on CBS and Paramount+, and Colbert will sing the National Anthem in a duet with Kenny Loggins. This event comes as news broke about Tom Brady buying a professional pickleball team, offering the rare phenomenon that makes you question whether you’re too young or too old to understand it.
If there’s a reason to be optimistic about any of this unrelenting Pickleball madness, it’s that Tom Brady has now jumped on the bandwagon, and we all know what he did to Bitcoin.
(via The Wrap)