Jersey Shore: Saltwater Daffy

Well, that happened. Last night a great fissure in the Earth's crust split open and out up from it crawled eight burned and skin-bubbled creatures, born of the bleakest and fieriest hell, sent to destroy our world. And by "destroy" I mostly mean slobber and spray all over one particular corner of it: the Jersey Shore! Yes dear friends, last night MTV unveiled its latest creation, a muscle-packed, generously breast-sprinkled reality creation about eight self-professed Guidos and Guidettes spending a summer down by the Seaside, working and loving and laughing. It was a big banging two hour premiere last night, so it might be too much to talk about each and every plot point. So let's instead dissect each of these eight miseries and take a peek inside their heads to see what makes them greasily tick.

The Situation. That's a person's name. The Situation. His brothers are an old hippie named The Happening and a crazy person named The Incident at Owl Creek. The Situation, whose Christian name is Mike, is a veiny (/vainy) and rippled gym rat who fancies himself something of a ladykiller. That he is visibly 41 years old and quite possibly a homosexual does not seem to affect his confidence in this matter in the slightest. Who knows where The Situation is from and, frankly, who cares. Alls we need to know is that he is 62 years old and that no woman can resist his Deli Selects abdominals. It's true. He just lifts up his shirt and the women come running—old witch-faced women, young witch-faced women, blind women, men dressed as witch-faced women. He'll lift up his shirt anywhere. At the Shop Rite? Sure. Down by the docks? You'd better believe it. At a funeral? Si si, mi amico. All The Situation ever is is abs. The Situation is abs. Abs is the situation. Isn't it terrific for a person to be defined solely by a physical attribute that will eventually fade and wink out of existence, like light in winter. Anyway.

The Situation's big situation (this will never get old) at the Jersey Shore house is that he has it bad for a girl named Sammi. Sammi is plump and rounded and has a horse's mane of brown hair and she is the "hot" one in the house. All the boys went all gaga goo-ga over her when she galoompfed into the seaside chateau and she knew it, had expected it, would have been devastated if she'd been greeted by anything but it. Sensing his pathetic doggedness, and vaguely feeling that he was hiding some sort of secret, Sammi immediately glommed to The Situation, or she at least let The Situation glom onto her. They were inseparable for the first glorious hours of their time on the Shore. They held hands while strolling the elegant boardwalk, they made kissy lips at each other at nightclubs. They swelled fast and furious, gazed into each other's eyes, felt the passion of eternity and the eternity of passion, they whispered things to one another, dove into one another, put on skin suits of one another, caressed big bulges of hair with one another. Their love is timeless and ageless. You look at this couple and you clasp your kerchief to your chest and take a big weepy breath and say "Oh aren't those two such a pair? Isn't it romantic? Aww, they're gonna f*ck." A timeless love story. The Situation was convinced last night that he and Sammi would eventually bump squishy orange Circus Peanut uglies, it was just a matter of when he decided it was time to bump squishy orange Circus Peanut uglies. Squishy orange Circus Peanut uglies. Bumping together. Over and over again. See! You're not hungry anymore! I'm helping that diet. But does The Situation have reason to be confident? No, no he does not. Because there's another player on the scene.

Ronnie is an enormous person who once killed Batman. Ronnie doesn't do much but hulk around with gold chains and laugh weirdly. Like, really weirdly. It's this sort of full-bodied giggle that shakes his lumpy mass and curls his face up into a scary, broad hyena grin. He looks ridiculous. He is ridiculous. Ronnie's main claim to fame is that he makes something called Ron-Ron Juice. Before you go there, no it's not a sex thing. It's a drink! A delicious drink that contains 3 parts ice, 1 part cherries, 1 part watermelon, and 463 parts vodka. He puts it all in a blender and then serves it up with no garnish or flourish. Ron-Ron Juice is meant to be gulped. And if you get Ron-Ron Juice all over your face, well... That happens sometimes. Ron-Ron Juice is also apparently some sort of lady-attractor, because Sammi is into Ronnie. The Situation was so busy being convinced that he and Samz were going to delicately and beautifully mash the dried butternut squash of their genitals together that he didn't even notice when Ronnie swooped in and totally macked it on the Samster. He finally got wise to this situation when, at a thrilling and high-class nightclub called Bamboo, he espied Sammi and Ronnie sucking delicious, Ron-Ron Juice-scented mug in a corner. The Situation's red, beady little face scrunched up into a look of sadness and horror and embarrassment (Oh gawd, those things I said to the camera..., you could see him gasping in his head.) Sammi had totally played The Situation. Convinced him after these long 48 hours that it was true love indeed, that theirs was a mutual desire that was going places, namely to the downtown Ground Round. But it wasn't because Ronnie won. So now The Situation hates Ronnie, and probably Sammi too. Someone else hates Ronnie too.

Angelina "Jolie" does not appreciate Ronnie and his loudness and his boyness. Jolie actually doesn't appreciate any of the boyness in the house. Oddly enough, The Situation articulated the reason for this just as I was about to text it to my sister. The very plain Jolie, who fancies herself some sort of au naturale beauty, is upset that none of the boys have expressed a slobbering desire for her. So she's chosen, in retaliation, to be a dedicated cockblock, harping on the harpies that the boys lure into their Drakkar Noir-scented lair. And, in some ways, she's right to. Because these rando girls? Gulp. They are horrible. They are wearing bras and panties into a mutual hottub with strangers and then taking off said bras and panties in the hottub and grinding up on greasy rum-sweating Guidos in the hottub all for the chance to appear on some dully glowing reality show that no one's ever heard of. America's youth is a ruined populace, I'm afraid. Ruined entirely. How horrible do you think that first batch of randos felt when they watched the episode last night and heard one of the boy roommates describe them as "semi-decent-looking"? I mean, that's cold, man. That's cold but terribly, terribly accurate. Anyhoo, Jolie hates this. She wanted to be object of all the boys' lust, and she is not, no how, will never be. What are you going to tell your friends back home now, Joles? Don't worry. You won't have to tell them anything, because they can watch it, Thursday nights on MTVizzle. Sad. Other than being shrill and vain and dumb and annoying, Jolie is boring.

Also sort of boring is Vinny, even though he is clearly the smartest of the group. Vinny is the smartest and most sensible and therefore the dullest. The most interesting thing that happened to him in last night's horridly long premiere extravaganza was that he got pink eye. That's conjunctivitis for you medical snobs out there. That's it. Ronnie speculated that Vinny had contracted the disease—which makes your eyeballs turn pink and then eventually burst into flames and fall out, sorry Vinny—because he had been dancing with a fat lady at the club. Specifically, he had crawled under her legs. Ronnie put on his best white powder wig, his fanciest velveteen tunic, his crispest buckle shoes, he put his hand gracefully in the air, stuck out one foot, did a grand bow, and said "Maybe she let somethin' pass while you was dancin' undah huh." Oh, Ronald. Master of words and theories! Expounder of the great historie and biologie of eye diseases caused by nightclub fat lady farts. Your mother must be so proud of the shiny new gun she just bought to kill herself with.

Speaking of killing, there's a girl on the show named JWoww who, j-wow, totally killed her relay with her boyfray on the second damn night of the damn show. JWoww spends most of her time walking around in a mortarboard and gown, quoting Rilke. When she is not wearing the mortarboard, it is immediately apparent that some sort of skunk has laid down and died atop her head, a fact of which she is evidently unaware. Or perhaps the dead skunk was her daemon and she just cannot part with its corpse, for sentimental reasons. Whatever the case, JWoww looks like she wakes up every morning, gets run over by a bus, and then goes about the rest of her day. After a night of drinking with her new sweaty friends, it was discovered that JWoww has a boyfriend back home at Oxford, where she's reading Maths. Everyone thought that it was mad shady that she hadn't said anything about the boyfriend all night, but especially Petey. Petey is perhaps the best-looking of the boys on the show, which is really not saying a whole hell of a lot. Occasionally, from certain angles, he has those leonine Italian features that can be quite fetching, but most of the time he is just a rank Guido with spiked hair and a bubblegum face. Petey is a DJ and Petey thinks that's cool. Petey lives in Rhode Island. There is no instance whatsoever in which a DJ in Rhode Island can be cool. Not in the hipster-flecked corners of Thayer Street, not in the seedy discotheques of Portsmouth, not in the khaki'd enclaves of Newport. If Candace Cameron had come to Little Compton, RI one day in 1990, that might have constituted a cool DJ in Rhode Island, but probably not. Anyway, JWoww and Petey have a flirtation and on the second evening, they kinda hooked up. They were at a clurb, of course, and dancing and making out and JWoww was wearing the most heinously low-cut top I've ever seen. Then back at home they made out more and somehow JWoww saw Petey's unmentionable item and said "It's pierced." And Petey said "Sshhh, no one knows that." Well, dear, they do now. Everyone: Petey's peter is pierced. There you go. So will they suck face some more? Oh, probably. Everyone on this show is so obsessed with sex that I'm sure everyone will boff everyone else and then they'll all just hump themselves into a perpetual-motion humping machine until the universe collapses on itself and all that's left is a big black hole, which the roommates will then hump.

The last person in the house is our true hero. Its name is Stinkbreath. Some people call it Snooki, others call it Snickers. But to us it is and forever will be Stinkbreath. Stinkbreath is an enormous female baby that some babysitter spilled Cheetos dust all over and then, in a wild panic, put a big black fright wig on it and mailed to Poughkeepsie. In Poughkeepise, Baby Stinkbreath was treated as a local hero. Revered and feared, catered to and indulged. After a spell, the baby was sent to the Jersey Shore and that's where we met it. Stinkbreath has a whiny, crumpled face and basically looks like Manny from Modern Family wearing an Elvira costume. Stinkbreath knows that it is an awful creature, unbearable to behold, so it feels very insecure outside of the inexplicably adoring environs of Poughkeepsie. Upon arrival, Stinkbreath immediately demanded a drink and proceeded to drink and drink and drink until Stinkbreath could barely stand, could barely mumble common Earth words, could do nothing but snake its stinkbreathy hands down boys' pants and murmur strange rune-language at the peteys that lay within. All the other roommates were horrified/amused by this bulging, sloppy display, especially when Stinkbreath found its way up to the roof and started caterwauling about things being unfair, about things being sad, about things never ever really being any good for old Stinkbreath. Nothing ever works out for Stinkbreath. Stinkbreath wants to go back to Poughkeepsie where people pay attention to Stinkbreath and no one is mean to Stinkbreath. Poor Stinkbreath.

The next day the kids had to go to work. Oh, yeah! Work! They have these jobs selling T-shirts and other knickknacks on the Boardwalk. They have a manager who is gruff and frustrated by his life, and he demands horrible things of the roommates like "Please don't be drunk at work" and "I'd love it if you could come to work on time." Horrors! Slave driver! Taskmaster! Stinkbreath, unfortunately, broke one of these cardinal rules its first day on the job. The morning after the big drunken debacle, Stinkbreath felt guilty and embarrassed and sad, but mostly sick. Stinkbreath spent all morning throwing up, and was thus late to attend the important "How to Sell T-Shirts to People Who've Walked Into the Store Because They Want to Buy T-Shirts" conference. Yikes. Stinkbreath got lightly chewed out by the sad-eyed, paunch-bellied manager, but it was not fired. But, oh well, it didn't matter anyway. Because after another night of no one paying attention to Stinkbreath, in which everyone else was fighting about rooftop "skanks" and Stinkbreath lay on its cot weeping, Stinkbreath decided to go home. Stinkbreath tried to call its caretaker, Daddy, but was unable to manipulate the phone machine. Actually, that was a hilarious segment last night. Stinkbreath vs. The Duck Phone. That wily Duck Phone. It always wins. The other roommates tried wanly to convince Stinkbreath to stay, but it remained steadfast in its desire. Well, until it realized that if it left, it wouldn't be on TV anymore. So it stayed! Stinkbreath will stay in the house and go out to nightclubs to try to meet the Guido of its dream. It picked one dude up on the third night, a wobbly fellow named Neil or something, but Neil ended up falling asleep when Stinkbreath wanted to make out and then when Neil did wake up, he was only waking up to throw up. Stinkbreath waddled downstairs and kindly got paper towels and stuff and walked Neil home. Good for you, Stinkbreath. That was kind.

So Stinkbreath is lonely and drunken and sad, but we love it anyway. The other roommates are oversexed, roided-up horrorshows, and we are slightly disappointed in them. I wish MTV had pulled back the reins just a liiiittle bit. These fool are a little too aware of their loud, lurching Guidoism. I'd have preferred people who didn't really get the joke. I don't think these people do either, but they're at least aware that something is going on. They're mugging a lot for the cameras. They're indicating mother-f'ers. Of course I'll watch, but it won't be with chuckling delight. It will be with curdling terror. Which is a fine way to watch a show, it's just not what I expected. This is one of the most VH1y shows that MTV has done in recent memory, but I suppose that's OK. At least they don't all have ridiculous nicknames like on Flava of Love! Oh... Sigh.

I'm done! I can't linger too much on these fools because there's Housewives to be discussed today too and my fingers are getting tired from typing "Stinkbreath."

Until next week! May the gulls always caw at you, the sea salt smell mingle with the stench of cheese balls. May your screeches resound out through the night, may your skin look eternally like a Thanksgiving turkey's. May you never be wrong. May you always be sure. May you forever be shore.

Oof. This one's gonna hurt, isn't it?