Actors Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard maintain they don’t host celebrity swingers parties, though they understand how the rumours got started.
The couple agreed that Shepard’s repeated jokes about the subject led to people actually believing him.
“I know exactly where that came from,” Bell said Monday on Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. “It’s because you frequently make key party jokes. We’ll have a dinner party or something, and as we’re sitting down, you’ll say, ‘Everybody leave your keys'.”
Shepard admitted he also often makes orgy jokes with his podcast guests.
“Some of them, I realise afterwards, ‘Oh, we do not have the same sense of humor,’” he told Bell. “I was like, ‘Hey, if you guys are ever in LA and you wanna swing...’”
Shepard, 48, has been making swinger jokes in some form since at least 2014. That year, he wrote a blog post titled Celebrity Orgy that was actually about keeping his kids out of the paparazzi spotlight.
Two years later, he went on Conan O’Brien’s show and suggested swapping wives with the late-night host. O’Brien later brought it up when Bell appeared as a guest.
“Are you aware that he was on the show recently and he casually, on the air, suggested a wife swap with you and my wife and us switching it up?” he asked.
“Yeah, this sounds like my husband,” Bell responded. “And I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re not the first person he’s tried to get us to swing with.”
Bell, 43, and Shepard married in 2013 and have two children together. They insist that all Shepard’s mentions of orgies are just jokes.
“A lot of people don’t get jokes,” Bell said on Monday’s podcast. “It’s such a bummer that everything you say has to be taken so literally that there’s no room for fun in expression or language anymore.” - New York Daily News/Tribune News Service