These Badlands Are Treating Us Good, by Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia – Pop Art… and Chris #54

December 15, 2009 Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia 1 Comment

Dear Art & Chris,

My organization has recently mounted a protest campaign against the new MTV show Jersey Shore. We feel the show, which advertises itself as featuring the “hottest, tannest, craziest Guidos,” is offensive to Italian-Americans. Do you think this show is portraying a false and negative stereotype about our people?

-Andre DiMino, President, Unico National

Andre,

Having gone to school in one of the most prominent Italian dumping grounds on the East Coast, Hofstra University aka Guidopia, we feel preeminently qualified to answer this question. We’re pretty sure that between the two of us we had at least one class with every cast member of this show. Their official bios would seem to indicate this isn’t possible but both of us would swear it on a stack of Alan Moore comics. These aren’t impossible stereotypes or even unusual ones. This is a seemingly thriving part of youth culture in the northeast.

You can’t say this show is offensive to Italian-Americans because while all Italian-Americans are Guidos not all Guidos are Italian. We’ve met Jewish Guidos and Hispanic Guidos. Chris even claims, and there’s no verification of this, that he even saw a Black Guido once. An occurrence more rare than a coherent episode of Family Guy.

The local news here in Los Angeles has been overwhelmed with reports of the “stars” of Jersey Shore being out here this week to do publicity and, presumably, to beg for agents. There was also an incident where the cast was taunted with racial slurs while waiting to get into a nightclub. This was a change of pace for the cast who are usually the ones shouting racial slurs when black people want to get into the clubs they attend back home. In the first three episodes of Jersey Shore we believe we have seen zero people of color.

We would like to make one thing clear. This show might be the funniest thing MTV has ever produced. We understand that this might sound like faint praise but they have long been the standard bearers for unintentional comedy. They do an excellent job of finding people too dumb to know they’re being laughed at and not with. This crop is both the dumbest and the funniest. The accents and twisted notions of ethnic pride are really just incidental.

Maybe there is a real reason to be afraid here? Could an entire generation grow up to be like this and is MTV only glorifying idiots? That is certainly a frightening possibility. It is the responsibility of organizations like Unico to encourage parents to use this show as an example of what not to be. You could even use the mockery on the internet as proof. Even if your friends think it makes you cool society as a whole is certainly laughing their asses off at you. At the very least teach them that their shirt collar should never be on the outside of their suit jacket collar. That looks tacky as all hell.