This essay is a part of a special Vanderpump Rules Avidly cluster, guest co-edited by Olivia Stowell and Jay Shelat.
Watching Vanderpump Rules makes me feel abject. I cannot believe these people are real, that we live in the same world. I find the cast members’ behavior baffling: their life choices, how they interact with each other (and in their confessionals), and how they express themselves, are often inscrutable to me. At the same time, the sense of abstraction and alienation I feel observing this bizarre world in which Jax, the Toms, Ariana, et al. dwell plays into the show’s greatest charm: its sense of humor. Specifically, the way its sense of humor relies upon what I term the “half-wit” aesthetic.
Take one of my favorite moments as an example. In the episode “Sex, Lies, and Audiotape,” Jax gets a motorized cooler that he uses to travel between the apartment he shares with his girlfriend Brittany, and Tom Schwartz’s apartment in the same building. The scooter/cooler then made a subsequent appearance after the episode aired, post-Brittany split: he was photographed taking it out of a Uhaul and riding it down the street, looking despondent.
As Jax rides the scooter, he takes on a childish aesthetic. Looking at him, I am strangely reminded of my 6-year-old, Jean-Jacques, and his prototypically childlike willingness to hold his emotions closer to the surface than adults do. Jax on his scooter is not only childlike in his fashion choices – his actions also call to mind how often children’s behavior mixes a sense of misery or piteousness with a sense of playful mobility in a way that feels comic; I can’t help but laugh.
Laughter exposes the comic object–here, a human being–as an object. Laughter reveals “something mechanical encrusted on the living”—a tension between the seemingly inexhaustible nature of life as a force and the mechanics of daily life, which then erupts in laughter. Jax’s sadness is human, the motorized cooler mechanical; the mechanical elaborates upon the sadness, making it seem childish, silly, perhaps insignificant, and, crucially, funny.
But funny in a way that’s not conventionally funny, or at least, not uncomplicatedly funny.
The comedy and antics of Vanderpump Rules are predicated on a“half-wit” aesthetic. VPR’s cast isn’t funny in the way that comedians or conventionally funny people are, but they still manage to create comedy (with the help of the show’s editors). For the most part, the humor comes across as incidental, created by the confluence of external events and circumstances colliding with the characters’ immovable narcissism (more malignant in some than others) and deep, almost pathological incuriousness (every single one of them seems to have the inner life of a golden retriever).
Take, for example: The Toms chanting “TOOOOOOOM” to psych themselves up for their restaurant’s opening exemplifies this collision. As Tom Schwartz explains, they’ve adapted the “ohm” chant from Hindu ritual to their own needs, completely abstracting an enormous, ancient concept to playfully center themselves in their friendship and joint business venture.
The half-wit sensibility functions in several milieus, depending on the episode’s dynamics and the characters’ emotional arcs. But one of the half-wit’s most common appearances is in how it exposes the role of comedy in the relationship between masculinity and power.
This relationship comes to a head in the show’s vital crucible of masculinity: the relationship between Jax and James Kennedy. Constantly trying to one-up each other to become “the number one guy in the group,” Jax and James circle each other over many seasons of manbaby conflict. The show deploys physical/prop comedy in the service of this crisis of masculinity: despite their shared proclivity for thunderous yelling, the violence Jax inflicts upon others is often kind of inert, as are James’ embittered outbursts.
To highlight how the half-wit aesthetic manifests as masculinity is not to say that the women on the show aren’t funny, or do not play a role in the Vanderpump comic sensorium. But it’s worth noting that the show is less funny when comedy is introduced formally. When Kristen does her sketch comedy show, for example, the episode becomes not about her jokes but about the drama between the cast members, as Kristen’s use of a photo of Jax’s penis in a sketch becomes less a moment for genuine levity and more as an opportunity to humiliate Jax.
It’s also in this episode where we hear one of the cringiest lines of all time, and one of few moments where Ariana’s Cool Girl facade is cracked, a moment that personally causes me so much physical and psychic pain that I can hardly bear to quote it: “I take sketch comedy very seriously.”
But, rest assured: despite their very serious commitments to sketch comedy, the women of VPR nonetheless perform half-wit sensibilities. The funniest moments with the girls are when they are experiencing confusion over a situation and struggling to articulate their feelings, or when they are delivering unwanted information to someone about seemingly mundane events (for the former, consider Lala trying to tell Raquel to realize James is a cheater: Lala: “WAKE! UP” Raquel:
For the latter, think Brittany solemnly informing Jax: “[Lisa] doesn’t want you to come to World Dog Day tomorrow”; for both, see Raquel not knowing who Charles Manson is and wondering aloud “Am I stupid?”) Let us not say these women aren’t funny, even if the jokes they make aren’t always the ones they attempt.
In particular, Stassi is frequently admired for her half-wit; as John Paul Brammer describes, “her royal brattiness is excused only by her wittiness in her confessionals.” I love her verbal emoting and imagery, like her reaction to Scheana’s ability to fake an orgasm in an acting class: “It’s like she’s a villain in a softcore porno!” Unlike Jax and James, though, Stassi’s barbs are frequently rescinded if they actually hurt someone. The humor for the girls functions as identity markers; Stassi’s personality is that she’s funny, and that becomes her brand. This is more of wit (or half-wit) as a soft power move than as the anxious masculine semi-violence of Jax and James’s physical/prop comedy.
In contrast, the noticeable difference in size between the beefier Jax and the lither James make the conflict between them about conflict itself, rather than just the branding of individuals. James and Jax use humor to hurt each other and establish dominance. James calls Jax’s fiancée a disco ball; Jax returns by calling James “a little elf on the shelf.” Thus, wWhile the women may use their humor as brand identities, whether they’re witty or they take sketch comedy very seriously, James and Jax use it to demarcate power as an economy of exchange, and make jokes at each other’s expense to claim control of that economy.
It’s not just them, though: Tom Schwartz, inspired by an Upright Citizen’s Brigade bit, puts steaks between his ass cheeks before serving them to Jax and Sandoval when he invites them to be his groomsmen. The boys then eat them, Tom informs them of their provenance, and the reactions from Jax and Sandoval differ: Jax, in a moment reminiscent of my experience of the show in general, experiences abjection, while Sandoval is irritated he didn’t come up with the joke first.
I confess: I am an easy laugher. I like to look for the laugh. And for me, even show’s title is a kind of joke. It makes reference to how, in the first episode of the series, Lisa Vanderpump outlines the rules she has for her restaurant’s staff: namely, that they are not to sleep with each other. And yet, of course, the cast’s disobedience to this rule makes up the plot of the show. How can we not laugh at/with them?
Eleanor Russell is a writer living in Taos, New Mexico. She takes comedy very seriously.