The Jersey Shore and Friendship

As we've discussed many times The Redel Traub Report is unquestionably about the life of the mind. We consider ourselves the successor to the "salon culture" that helped foster the Enlightenment. If this blog has one goal its to spark a second Enlightenment, which, I guess, would focus on politics, wikipedia, and other bullshit I happen to be interested in. Perhaps not as lofty as new conceptions of the origin of sovereign rule, or the rights of man, but certainly more interesting. With that said, we at the Redel Traub Report do have our guilty pleasures, I've mentioned my penchant for The Celebrity Apprentice and Sarah Palin's Alaska. Though I, in some ways, reject the notion of guilty pleasures, that is a topic for a different blog post. Today is certainly an appropriate day for this discussion, because it marks the premier of the newest season of The Jersey Shore.

The show is often a target of criticism. It's offensive to Italians, it's voyeuristic, it's simply stupid and boring. All these complaints are valid to some degree, the show is often boring and generally centers on the drunken exploits of "guidos". However, these are not the reasons the show is enjoyable. For me the show hits its high watermark when it simply focuses on the friendships between the cast. By this I refer to the inside jokes the cast is constantly coining such as "GTL" T-Shirt Time" and "Grenade". The substance of the jokes matter less than the element of human friendship we can all relate to.

As I've grown older and begun to get a better sense about the nature of friendship, the more I've come to believe that it's these small inside jokes that truly form the basis of the human relationship. The reasons for this are many, an inside joke often relies on a shared experience, or at least a shared sensibility. Almost every group of friends I've ever been in, or even been witness to, starts to develop their own slang, their own quasi language. These reveal a worldview in some ways, the things that mutual friends find funny reflect a shared schema of the world. For instance, for the Shore cast, nothing is funnier than saying T-shirt time, because it instantly takes them to a place they can fundamentally relate too. For them, the focus of life is going out drinking and clubbing. "Tshirt Time" refers to the point during one's evening right before they are about to hit the town, when they change out of their house clothes, and into a fancy shirt, generally an Ed Hardy in the case of the Shore. This is part of the reason young people identify with and enjoy the Jersey Shore, "t-shirt time" is a recognizable moment of many young peoples lives, the Shore just created a lexicon to easily identify it.

This is what truly makes this blog the finest repository for news and opinion on the net, even when discussing a topic as banal as the Jersey Shore, we find a way to relate it to a big part of the human experience. Reality TV is fun to watch because it's enjoyable to watch human interaction, reality tv often heightens the stakes by having said interaction be a train wreck. I'll be tuning in tonight to watch the drunken exploits of Snooki, Sitch, and the rest of the gang, because at this point after 4 seasons with them they are people I've come to know and understand. The Jersey Shore, and reality tv, are garbage in many ways, but in other ways they are a truer expression of the human condition than any creative artist has ever produced. And you're a grenade if you disagree.