Was J.D. Vance trying to lean into couch-sex rumor with bad joke about his wife?

The fake but incessant rumor about the GOP vice presidential candidate and a piece of furniture flared up again after he cracked a joke about his wife banishing him from the bedroom.

In his two weeks as the GOP vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance has not proven himself to be the most agile performer on the campaign trail.

So, perhaps that explains the strange joke that the conservative Ohio senator made at a rally in Nevada Tuesday, which only served to fuel the fake but incessant rumor that he once had sex with a couch. Vance quipped that his wife, Usha, would banish him from their bedroom and send him to sleep on the couch if he made her get on stage.

“Now, I would call her up here to come and speak,” Donald Trump’s running mate said. “But then I think I’d have to sleep on the couch tonight, so I’ll leave her alone.”

Vance offered a big smile as he delivered his joke, raising the question of whether the former Silicon Valley tech investor was trying to prove that he’s not such a prig and can laugh at himself being an internet punching bag. Either that, or it slipped Vance’s mind that Stephen Colbert and other late-night comedians have been having fun with the idea that he once got intimate with a piece of furniture.

Whatever Vance’s intention, his wife joke didn’t land, earning at most some tepid, awkward laughter from the crowd at the rally, the Daily Beast reported. Among other things, Vance proved that his delivery needs some work and that he and his speechwriters should try humor that’s more up-to-date than Henry Youngman “Take my wife… Please” jokes.

But perhaps worse for the Trump campaign, Vance proved that the couch-sex joke is not ready to die, the Daily Beast reported. People on X, where the rumor originated on July 15, had a field day, mocking him for fueling such a bizarre rumor at a time when he and the former president are fighting efforts by the Democrats to label them as just plain “weird,” the Daily Beast said. The couch-sex rumor also erupted as Vance has come under fire for disparaging “childless cat ladies” and Americans who don’t have kids, describing them as “sad, lonely, and pathetic.”

The couch-sex “discourse” started on July 15, shortly after Trump revealed that Vance would be his vice presidential pick, Business Insider reported. X user, @rickrudescalves, posted a joke about Vance that allegedly referred to something he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” his 2016 New York Times best-selling memoir about growing up in an economically devastated Ohio town before finding his way to Yale Law School. The X user said Vance wrote about having sex with an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions, and said this scene was described on pages 179-181.

“Needless to say, pages 179 through 181 of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ are not devoted to an account of Vance’s couch surfing, and there’s no evidence that he’s ever done anything to a couch other than sit on one,” Business Insider reported.

Still, many people found the couch-sex joke pretty funny. Memes of Vance fantasizing about living-room furnishings flooded the internet. Others tried to share some pretty hilarious jokes of their own on social media. One post sounds as though it could have inspired Vance’s wife joke: X user @fattmellows wrote on July 25: “JD Vance upsetting his wife on purpose so he has to sleep on the couch.”

Even though Business Insider said the couch-sex scene was “very obviously” a joke, the Associated Press went to the trouble to debunk it with a serious-minded fact-check story, though it gave the article the meme-worthy headline, “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.”  The news service subsequently deleted the fact-check from its website, but its explanation — the article “didn’t go through our standard editing process” — generated more jokes and served to propel the couch discourse into the mainstream, Business Insider said.

In recent days, the couch memes had begun to slow down, buried by other topics and controversies in what’s been an incredibly busy month in U.S. politics, the Daily Beast said.

That is, until Vance resurrected the fake rumor himself on Tuesday with his awkward joke about his wife. And, so, the comments flared up again on X posts sharing a clip of Vance’s attempt at humor.

One person wrote:  “A reminder that JD Vance hasn’t publicly denied the couch allegations.” Another X user added, “Oh man. He’s uh. Admitting to it?” And yet another said, “Seriously, the couch thing is gonna follow him for the rest of his life…”