Social Media Roasts Steve Harvey For Miss Universe Debacle

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — The Miss Universe pageant and comedian Steve Harvey are still apologizing Monday for an excruciating mistake he made on the 2015 Miss Universe pageant he hosted Sunday night.

Harvey mistakenly named the wrong contestant as the winner. He crowned Ariadna Gutierrez Arevalo of Colombia as Miss Universe instead of Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach of the Philippines.

"I have to apologize. The first runner-up is Colombia," Harvey said. It was an extremely awkward and uncomfortable moment for both beauty queens as they both looked shocked.

Harvey blamed himself for reading the cue card wrong. "This is exactly what's on the card. I will take responsibility for this. It was my mistake," he said on the show.

The debacle has since been immortalized by memes on social media.

To make matters worse, Harvey took to Twitter to apologize, but initially misspelled the home countries of both contestants before also fixing that.

Former Miss California Toay Foster Ortiz said either Harvey made an honest mistake or the whole thing was part of a larger plan.

"What if there was something going on with Fox and they want to make sure that: Hey, let's kind of may be make a little mistake here because we really want people to know that we're now carrying Miss Universe," Ortiz speculated.

Miss Los Angeles County and Miss Santa Barbara County were definitely watching Sunday night. Both were stunned when the announcement was made, saying the runner-up's name always comes first. Still, they said Miss Columbia and Miss Philippines handled the situation with the grace of a true beauty queen.

"I think she did a really good job with her reaction and with acting like a good title holder as Miss Columbia," Miss Los Angeles County Rachael Maurer said.

"I would have been very shocked, somewhat embarrassed at the same time. But as Miss Columbia was very conservative and also respectful, I would have done as she did," Miss Santa Barbara County Arianna Lemus said.

Other beauty pageant insiders said another possible solution could have been crowning co-winners. But that doesn't seem to be a possibility, at least not right now.