Sean Spicer Made A Surprise Emmys Appearance (The Surprise Being That We've Normalized Sean Spicer!)

The 69th Primetime Emmy Awards had a fun, surprise guest: a former White House press secretary who once claimed that President Donald Trump's inauguration "was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe" and later insisted that Hitler never used chemical weapons. (Photographic evidence blatantly showed otherwise; Hitler gassed millions of Jews).

During the end of his opening monologue Sunday night, Emmys host Stephen Colbert joked that there was no way of knowing how big the award show's audience was. "I mean, is there anyone who could say how big the audience is? Sean, do you know?" Colbert asked, before former White House press secretary Sean Spicer walked out on the stage, wheeling a mock White House podium.

"This will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period. Both in person and around the world," Spicer said, echoing his own statements on the morning of January 22, when he lied to the American people with a straight face about inaugural crowd sizes, setting an ominous tone for facts coming out of the White House press room.

And then the crowd laughed (a few looked agape), Spicer grinned, and Colbert laid out one last, mild zinger: "Melissa McCarthy, everybody, give it up."

Congratulations, America, we've normalized Sean Spicer.

The reception appeared to be even warmer backstage, where Spicer was "mobbed" in the Emmys lobby, according to Hollywood Reporter reporter Chris Gardner:

The reception on the internet, however, was not quite as warm. Many called out what they perceived as the normalization of the former White House press secretary:

Great work, everybody. This was almost as funny as the travel ban.