I’ve only seen about 20 minutes of the Jersey Shore. It reminded me of the hours spent getting ready for a night out when I was in college and my roommate was from Long Island. There was a lot of makeup, a lot of drama, and not a lot of intelligent conversation. Those evenings usually ended badly.
It occurs to me that the Jersey Shore actors are so uniformly horrible that they may actually be a troupe of French Existentialist performance artists who wanted to deliver a commentary about the low standards of American television audiences.
They gave themselves strict rules such as:
- “The Situation” is limited to a vocabulary of less than 400 words.
- “Snookie” must be incessantly ludicrous, with skirts increasingly short and breasts increasingly large.
- “JWoww” cannot ever appear in a naturally occurring skin color.
They believed that in less than two weeks , the American public would discover their true identities, yet we never did. And now, the French Existentialist troupe is trapped in their own Sartrian version of “No Exit.” They dream of leaving the waxing, gelling, profanity and tanning behind, but they are artists who willl see this performance through to its conclusion.
This thought has had me amused for over a week.
It now seems more likely to be true than false.
Eileen P. Daly-Boas 