Where Were You When You Heard About Donna Kelce’s Home Renovations?
Where were you when you heard the news of Donna Kelce’s home remodel? Over the weekend, TMZ exclusively reported a piece of news about Kelce, mother of NFL superstars Jason and Travis Kelce and recent star of The Traitors.
Specifically, they found documents detailing new renovations to Donna’s home in Orlando, Florida, including hiring “a company to replace nine windows and six doors.” Compared to some of the outlet’s more salacious and boundary-crossing reporting, it was extremely tame. But the nature of just how tame the news of Kelce’s home renovation was, mixed with TMZ‘s bright-red “EXCLUSIVE” graphics and the pulpy energy of the outlet in general, quickly led the tweet about it to go viral.
I, admittedly, was off of social media for the majority of this weekend: only to return and find a deluge of memes on the topic. Twitter users broke the news to each other using everything from Abby Lee Miller gifs, to screenshots from All the President’s Men, to age-old staples like photos of George W. Bush finding out about 9/11 and the Obama-era Situation Room.
You can’t scroll too far without finding Donna Kelce-inspired fake Spotify countdowns, Daylight Savings Time jokes, and variations of the funniest line from 2019’s Joker. Any other news that has attempted to break through the noise, like basketball scores or Cinncinati Bengals QB Joe Burrow potentially dating Jessica Alba or reports that Donna’s own son is, in fact, planning on returning to the NFL next season, are jokingly getting dwarfed by it. Jason even joined in on the meme, responding to TMZ‘s initial post with “BREAKING!! Sources confirm Donna Kelce’s eldest son watched 2 hours of Bluey yesterday.”
Why Is This So Funny?
Let’s be honest: we’re currently in a moment when too many pieces of bad updates are competing for our attention, making us feel (in the words of Adult Swim’s Smiling Friends) like we need to “check the news, it doesn’t matter what channel.” Even some of the tweets about Donna Kelce’s home renovation have leaned into this fact, joking about how oil prices and the ongoing attacks on Iran are going to be impacted by her getting new windows installed.
In reality, the news of Kelce’s home renovation is so benign that it doubled back around to being funny and oddly unifying. As much as the Kelce family have become household names, and a whole new audience became aware of Donna due to her time on The Traitors, her approach to being in the spotlight has always been unique. It’s involved pap walks carrying Ziploc bags and engaging with stan accounts for her son and future daughter-in-law Taylor Swift. She’s the type of woman who, as countless posts from Swifties have argued over the past few years, could have “run a Joann Fabrics like the Navy.”
Realistically, we probably wouldn’t have ever heard about the home renovation, unless Donna somehow leveraged it into (as one tweet puts it) “the biggest HGTV deal known to man.” But the fact that we did hear about it, and that the news can be a goofy respite in an otherwise-chaotic moment, is kind of delightful. Sure, the phrase “Donna Kelce’s home renovation” sounds like Winter Soldier activation words or lost lyrics from “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but it might be the kind of thing we need to hear right now. At very least, it’s going to make for a fun segment on the next episode of Jason and Travis’ podcast, New Heights.
(featured image: Euan Cherry/PEACOCK)
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