Free The Best Australian Humorous Writing by Andrew O'Keefe Page B

back.”
    Like
Kim Kardashian Superstar
and Kim’s support bra,
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
is essentially a vehicle for Kim’s breasts. It is only a reality TV show in the sense that it is more real than, say,
Shaun the Sheep
or
Teletubbies
. It feels rehearsed, staged and very badly acted, particularly by Kris, who seems unable to play herself with any emotional authenticity. Similarly, Kim is not a very good Kim Kardashian, which augurs badly for her stated ambitions to star in other, more challenging roles.

    There are two kinds of people: those who watch pay TV and those who have no idea what the other kind are talking about. Those who watch pay TV tend to watch everything on pay TV, and are the only people in Australia who might have heard of Kimora Lee Simmons, star of
Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane
.
    Simmons, a former model, owns the clothing brand Baby Phat, and is the ex-wife of Russell Simmons, co-founder of the Def-Jam record label. Part Japanese and part African-American, she calls herself “a pop culture phenomenon”. Much of her appeal seems to rest on the regularity with which she uses the word “fabulous”, from which she has derived a new noun, “fabulosity”.
    Simmons has skin the colour of pawpaw, and licorice hair like a Gauguin muse. She talks about Carla Bruni (“always very fabulous”), Victoria Beckham (“fabulous”) and Amy Winehouse. (“I’m not saying she’s not fabulous. She’s quite fabulous in her own lane. Which is not my lane.”)
    Simmons does not stop talking, even when her sentence is finished and her idea is clearly exhausted. It is as if she cannot stop, does not know when to stop, has no idea of structure or punctuation or logic. She consistently contradicts whatever she said last, and appears to be speaking not so much to communicate as to drown out the competing voices in her head. When she says “negative” she adds “connotation”, even when nothing is connoted. When she says “talented” she appends “bunch”, even when she means only one person.
    Was she worried about putting her two children on the show? “I don’t think my kids know that they’re different because they’re on TV,” says Simmons, “because that’s their world. Their nieces and nephews [she means their cousins] have a reality TV show, too.”

    Simmons’s niece and nephew star in MTV’s
Run’s House
, about the family life of Russell Simmons’s brother, Rev Run, once a rapper with Run-DMC. Kim Kardashian, before
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
, guested in reality shows
Sunset Tan
(about a tanning salon) and
The Simple Life
. Even her sister Kourtney has appeared in
Rich Kids: Cattle Drive
. When Kim posed for a
Playboy
centrefold,she cemented a link between two competing LA unrealities, the Kardashians and the Playboy Mansion.
    The
Girls of the Playboy Mansion
press conference is the only one held off site, at Hef’s place itself. The mansion is the expected mix of culture and kitsch, with a Picasso on one wall and a portrait of Hef with three lions on another. There are peacocks in the grounds, and cabin rooms with beds, magazines and tissues, for party guests (but not journalists) to “get to know each other”.
    Hef appears first. At 82, and dressed, as usual, in his pyjamas and dressing-gown, he somehow manages not to look as if he has just torn out his drip and escaped from the hospice.
    He may have had a bit of surgery on his face, and a lot of creative work done with the remains of his hair. It is impossible to say where his part is, and a dark streak that perhaps once grew down from the side of his head now turns upwards and shelters his crown. But he still looks good. He has bedroom eyes, lizard eyes, laughing eyes, and the lines on his face flex then fade when he smiles.
    In the savagely compelling show, the jewel in E!’s navel, Hef sleeps