Katie Couric Made a Health Ad Spoofing Sydney Sweeney

Katie Couric just turned a colonoscopy into a fashion moment. Sort of.

The journalist teamed up with Ryan Reynolds' production company to spoof Sydney Sweeney's controversial American Eagle ad. Except instead of selling jeans, she's selling cancer screenings. In a hospital bed. Wearing a denim jacket.

The PSA opens with Couric saying "Speaking of jeans" before dropping the fact that most people who get colon cancer aren't genetically predisposed to it. Then she adds in a weirdly flirty voice: "Mine are televised."

It's bizarre. It's uncomfortable. And that's exactly the point.

Why She's Doing This Again

Twenty-five years ago, Couric got a colonoscopy on live TV on the "Today" show. Her husband Jay Monahan had died from colon cancer two years earlier. She wanted to destigmatize both the disease and the screening.

It worked. Colonoscopies increased by 20 percent afterward. They literally call it the "Katie Couric Effect."

Now she's back with Reynolds' Maximum Effort team and the Colorectal Cancer Alliance because apparently people still aren't getting screened. Everyone 45 and older should be getting checked, whether they think they're at risk or not.

The Weird Part That Works

Couric says she wore more makeup for this ad than she has in five years. She tried to be "fetching and seductive," which is hilarious when you're talking about colon cancer screening.

"I think it was one of the first times that a journalist or a public figure had really undergone a medical procedure on national television," she said about the original screening. Back then it was groundbreaking. Now she's making jokes about it.

The whole campaign is deliberately silly. Reynolds and Rob McElhenney did one. Terry Crews did another. They're using humor because lectures about cancer screening don't work.

The Actually Scary Part

Here's what should freak you out: by 2030, the number of people under 50 with colorectal cancer is going to double. Young people are getting this at increasing rates, and nobody really knows why.

Couric's worried about this too. These younger people can't get routine screenings yet. By the time they find out, it's often too late.

"It is such a tragedy when young people are diagnosed with this disease, and they didn't have an opportunity to get screened and prevent it from spreading," she said.

Her Cancer Advocacy Goes Beyond This

After her husband died, Couric became the unofficial face of colon cancer awareness. But she didn't stop there. She got a mammogram on TV in 2005. Nearly two decades later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself.

She helped launch The Alex Trebek Fund for pancreatic cancer research with his widow. She's basically made cancer awareness her second career.

Why This Ad Might Actually Work

People gravitated to her original colonoscopy because they knew she wasn't doing it for ratings. Her husband had just died. Her motives were "pure," as she puts it.

This new ad takes a different approach. Instead of tragedy and sincerity, it's using absurdist humor. Couric in a denim jacket talking seductively about medical procedures is so weird it might actually get people's attention.

She hopes it'll get people talking. More importantly, she hopes they'll call their doctors.

The Bottom Line

Colon cancer is highly preventable if caught early. That's the whole point. You can literally prevent cancer by getting a screening. How many cancers can you say that about?

The fact that Couric has to make sexy jean parody ads to get people to pay attention to this is ironic. But if that's what it takes, she'll do it.