Who Needs a ‘Doctor’ for Relationship Advice When You Can Have Steve Harvey?

Radio host, bestselling author, and Original King of Comedy Steve Harvey began a stint as a family and relationship expert for Good Morning America today. You can see how he stacks up against other TV reporters on the Power Grid here. It’s a good, if somewhat cynical, move for both parties.

Steve Harvey’s turnaround from comedian to relationship expert has been a great, lucrative self-reinvention. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man has been at or near the top of the New York Times Bestseller List for 28 weeks now. And if you’re GMA, why hire a boring run-of-the-mill doctor or journalist to give relationship advice when you can hire a popular comedian? After all, when Katherine Heigl’s morning show producer hired bad boy Gerard Butler to give no-nonsense relationship advice in The Ugly Truth, ratings went through the roof! And The Ugly Truth was everybody’s favorite summer movie of ’09.

Harvey’s relationship advice isn’t about bringing the laffs as much as it is about bringing the conservatism. His schtick is the Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus/The Ugly Truth/every-successful-romantic-comedy of-the-past-20-years party line that men are conniving jerks who just want sex without commitment and women must coldly thwart them to find love, matrimony, and free dinners. Which is to say, it was designed to enrage Jezebel readers.

Today’s Steve Harvey segment on GMA was straight out of that playbook. The topic was “Can Men and Women Just Be Friends?” The answer was no, duh. Here’s the rundown of his advice to four different couples:

• Husband: you can’t be friends with that older woman who coached you in a speaking competition, because she is probably a “cougar” (I mean, she’s an older woman)
• Girlfriend: you think men and women can be friends? How naive! “It’s almost virtually impossible for a man to be a woman’s friend.”
• Newlywed husband who got a text message from another woman saying ‘sweet dreams’ right before his wedding: “She’s certainly not saying have sweet dreams about your wife.”
• Committed couple that’s been dating for 11 years, but doesn’t want to get married: (sputtering disbelief)