Michael J. Fox's Bob Hope Humanitarian Award speech at the Emmys left the room in tears
Award shows manufacture emotion the way Vegas manufactures daylight. Then, once in a while, something real gets through.
Monday night it was Michael J. Fox, brought onstage in a wheelchair by his Good Wife co-star Julianna Margulies, greeted by a standing ovation before he said a word — and sent off with another one after.
Why him, why this award
The Bob Hope Humanitarian Award isn't an annual participation ribbon; the Television Academy hands it out only when someone actually earns it. Oprah got the first one in 2002. Fox got this one for three decades of turning his own diagnosis into other people's treatment: the Michael J. Fox Foundation is now the largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson's research on the planet, behind more than $3 billion in funding.
The timing had poetry in it, too. Forty years ago, a 25-year-old Fox won his first Emmy for Family Ties. This year he was nominated for the 19th time, for Shrinking — still working, still in the building.
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The speech
He opened with Bob Hope himself, recalling how his Depression-era parents saw the man who spent his holidays entertaining troops in Berlin and Saigon "with a turkey leg and a golf club." The lesson he took: when it gets tough, you show up, and if there's joy in it, better still.
Then he got to the hard part — the years after his 1991 diagnosis, when he told no one. "Would they laugh if they knew I was sick?" he asked the room, describing the fear that going public would cost him his audience. The opposite happened, and the support, he said, was what kept him going.
"I understood that accepting Parkinson's didn't mean I had to surrender to it."
That was the line that did it. Cameras cutting across the theater caught A-listers openly crying, and for once nobody was performing for the cameras. Some people get honored for a career. Fox got honored for what he did with the worst thing that ever happened to him — and cracked jokes the entire way through.
Awards television, 78 years in, finally justified its runtime.
Previously we wrote: Bob Mackie has died at 87 - he sketched Marilyn's "Happy Birthday" dress and never saw it for 54 years
