Netflix‘s new live dating series has gotten off to a rocky start.
The streamer recently announced it would begin airing the viral YouTube dating experiment Pop the Balloon LIVE. In the series, singles line up to learn more about eligible romantic prospects. But if they’re not feeling the spark, they can pop the balloon at any point and possibly have the person eliminated.
Pop the Balloon, which is hosted by Insecure star and stand-up comedian Yvonne Orji, premiered just Thursday (April 10). But a major incident occurred during the live premiere when contestant Johnny Bananas, who many may remember from several seasons of The Challenge, made a racist joke about a Black woman on the show.
In a clip shared to X that has now been viewed 2.1 million times, Orji asks Bananas if any of the women on stage was his “type.”
“Let’s start with the toes,” Bananas replies as he begins inspecting the feet of the women standing on stage beside him. He then begins to comment on their feet one by one, noting some of them had “pretty toes,” until he made it to one contestant.
“You look like you sleep from a tree upside down,” he says.
The comment immediately earned groans and shocked reactions from the audience and the cast.
Johnny Bananas from “The Challenge” told the black woman on ‘Pop The Balloon’ LIVE that she looks like she sleeps from a tree upside down https://t.co/gDfpztJOD1 pic.twitter.com/8oajjEvDeI
— Glock Topickz (@Glock_Topickz) April 11, 2025
“Me? Oh you don’t want the smoke from me, Johnny,” she replies. “Was he talking about me?”
Orji did not address the comment during the live broadcast. Instead, she asked him how the “toes” would help him “build a home” before promptly sending him backstage.
This moment comes just weeks after Bananas faced backlash for sending Big Brother winner Taylor Hale a series of banana emojis, followed by a gorilla emoji, on X. Bananas denied responsibility and instead placed the blame on a marketing agency who was handling his social media to promote his cryptocurrency, $BANANAS. The reality star said he was “strongly considering” taking legal action against the company at the time.
He called it an “ill-advised move,” noting the emojis have a different meaning in the “crypto world.”
“I do not take this situation lightly at all,” he told Variety. “As soon as I was made aware of what happened, I reached out to Taylor because my main concern was making sure that she had as much clarity as she could have… I wanted to make sure she knew the truth.”
Hale said she “did not believe the intent of the tweet to be racist” but she took issue with the delay in his response, which led to her receive an “influx of messages from his fandom saying I look like a manly gorilla — a racist trope against Black women.”
Bananas’ comments on the Pop the Balloon premiere has fans calling for the show to be canceled after just one episode.
“He never misses a chance to be racist,” one viewer wrote about Bananas, while another called the controversial premiere episode the “grand opening and closing.”
New episodes of Pop The Balloon air Thursdays at 8/7c on Netflix.
The post ‘The Challenge’ Vet Johnny Bananas Cracks “Racist” Joke About A Black Woman On Netflix’s Live TV Show ‘Pop The Balloon’ appeared first on Decider.
