Jersey Shore

The Hangover Season 2 Episode 2

Let’s be honest here, people: Who hasn’t had a Schnookie night? A Dude, Where’s My Car? kind of evening of which details are hazy, but you’re pretty sure you kissed someone (perhaps even three-way kissed?) and maybe even ate a whole pie of pizza at the end of the night, the empty box of which is the only available evidence (other than your massive stomachache). This Jersey Shore episode is aptly titled “The Hangover,” owing to Ronnie’s fuzzy memory of all that bad behavior from the previous night — that he asks Pauly D, “I didn’t three-way kiss anybody, did I?” leads us to believe that perhaps he’s amping up the blackout card in order to get out of answering to the increasingly shrill (and invasive!) Sammi, but no matter, the truth will come out eventually, especially if Mike and his girlish love of gossip has anything to do with it. “I’m never drinking like that again,” says Ronnie, as he pours some additional vodka into his cup. We can almost feel the twitchy, painful, post-blackout morning he’s having, and it’s making us anxious by proxy. Through the TV his scent wafts; a mixture of tequila, cigarettes, and Cool Water. Thankfully, Ronnie’s got a reality show to document his drunken shenanigans; most people have to make do with embarrassing Facebook pictures that must be furiously detagged the next morning.

This week, we’re changing up our recap format; instead of catchphrases, we’re ranking each cast member in terms of who was the classiest of the bunch. And what constitutes class? For this group, it’s more of a reverse look-up situation — hitting, falling down, cheating, three-way kissing, lying, snooping, buying clothes specifically made for drag queens … depending on the week, these might push you down to a lower position. So let’s see who topped this week’s Jersey Shore Class-Off (and who’s a permanent member of the IFF)! From least to most classy:

8. Angelina — The Loser!
Angelina is shaping up to be the worst. While the other housemates enjoy the day, shopping at tranny stores and buying soon-to-be-on-the-floor chicken, Angelina sleeps in till all hours, uses the phone constantly, and gives unsolicited, bad advice. “I personally, like, think that, like, me being your friend, like, you should just be single,” she sagely tells Ronnie, who’s forced into being nice to her because she witnessed his three-way-kissing debacle (“She has dirt,” in his words). We must give her props for not rising to Jenni’s taunts during their seemingly pointless fight (literally: She lazily reclines on a lounge chair the entire time), and defending herself ably (“I hang out with everyone from Long Island; I’m friends with everyone from Long Island!”), but she quickly descends into classlessness and loses the episode in the last ten minutes. After befriending a random girl at a club, getting drunk, and falling over a couch, Angelina decides to confront Pauly D about flirting with someone who’s engaged. “Just a little bit of alcohol, and throughout the night it’s worse and worse and worse, until, voilà!, Mrs. Cockblock of the century comes out and that’s who she truly is,” narrates Mike. Back at the house, the boys are innocently cooking up some chicken tenders when Angelina bursts in on the scene wearing sunglasses, and ranting about how she’s in love with Pauly D. “I would marry you. I think about you every day.” “WHAT?” Mike and Pauly answer in unison. It seems Angelina has gone insane — Mike nervously glances at the camera at one point, silently entreating the cameramen to step in should Angie grab a knife. And then, out of nowhere, she slaps Pauly in the face. And that, folks, is how you lose the Class-Off.

7. Ronnie
While Ronnie certainly wasn’t as bad this week as he was in the premiere episode, he’s still pretty near the bottom of the bunch. “I’m Pauly D, and you’re … fucked,” Pauly tells him of his behavior from the night before, during which he made out with hundreds of random girls and then cuddled up beside Sammi and slept in her bed. Ronnie is an unimpressive liar, and when he tells Sammi that nothing happened, she’s still suspicious. “Ronnie’s new nickname is IFF — IFF is the ‘I’m fucked foundation.’ He’s a client and the president,” says Pauly, who’s on a roll this week. Ronnie makes himself an egg-white omelette for breakfast, which, considering his state, is an impressive feat, and actually somewhat classy (egg whites equal class, obviously). But he’s brought down again by his pledge to “deny, deny, deny” any wrongdoings and then spew this BS to Sammi as his excuse for calling his ex-girlfriend: “My weakness with you is that I love you so fucking much, and that’s my downfall … is that I love you so fucking much.” Yeahhh, we’ve heard that one before, bub. (Though this line: “It’s awkward, bro, it’s not Saved by the Bell, we’re not fucking Zach and Kelly, It’s weird,” is genius.) To top it off, Ronnie decides he wants to feel some “pain,” and so drags Sammi with him to a tattoo parlor for four hours, during which he gets a massive tattoo of praying hands with a rosary around them. Using God to get out of your drunken sins? Not classy, bro.

6. JWOWW
Ah, JWOWW, we love you, but you’ve got to chill out. Jenni and the girls go to Funky Sex Couture, where she finds inspiration for the designs (and name) of her fashion line, Filthy Couture. JWOWW picks up a holey, leotardlike drag costume, tries it on, and then buys it. (“The sex shop is perfect — perfect, perfect, perfect. It’s my scene and when I get into my scene, I get in my clothes”). Where is she going to wear that thing? Hopefully not out of the bedroom. But where JWOWW really loses classy points is when she jumps into the fight between Snooki and Angelina. “You run your mouth to all my best friends — J420, Joey Angst, Bill … ,” she starts out, semi-calmly, before launching into this tirade: “You want to get your ass beat, you can get your fucking ass beat. You can stay and get your ass beat, you can stay, get your fucking ass beat, you can stay, get your fucking ass beat … Sleep with one fucking eye open, sleep with one fucking eye open; I’m gong to make you sweat it out, I’m going to make you sweat it out.” Holy Jesus, JWOWW should enter a slam poetry contest; the venom and misplaced anger in this rant, the repetition and violent imagery — seriously, she should submit it to a hipster literary magazine. (Watch the clip below.) So maybe, in that way, it is classy? Nah.

5. Snooki
Snooks, will ya take off those horrendous, diamond glasses for a second, please? We have something to tell you: Spending $400 on a pair of “bling, bling” sunglasses, which you can’t even see out of, does not a classy Jersey Shore guidette make. Of course, Snooki knocks over Mike’s marinating chicken and then really doesn’t want to deal with the mess. “My first thought was, I don’t want to clean this up, my second thought was, I just fucked up dinner, my third thought was, what the fuck am I going to eat?” Mike nicely orders dinner for the house, and as usual, someone helps Snooki with the cleanup (this time it’s Vinny, who teaches Snooks that using a rag is preferable to thousands of paper towels). Snooki does have a sense of honor — when she finds out that Angelina called her gorilla boyfriend a “fucking m—–” (what is that word, please??), she storms over to Angie. “I don’t care about me, you can talk shit about me all you want. But if you talk about my girls, my boyfriend, or my family … that’s when I I‘m going to fuck you up,” she says. But the fact that her phone etiquette is lacking (“Can I speak to Angelina, please?” “No, she died.”), and she keeps her jewel-encrusted glasses on for the entirety of the episode, lands poor Snooks towards the bottom of the bunch.

4. Sammi
Saaaaaaami is a total snoop, but at least she admits it. She goes through Ronnie’s phone messages, finds one from his ex, and confronts him about it immediately. “I don’t think any boyfriend/girlfriend has a right to go through each other’s stuff,” remarks Ronnie, rightly. Sammi blames her stalker-y ways on her “twisted” mind, but come on, that’s a pretty lame excuse. If you’re going to break into someone’s e-mail/phone messages/house, at least do it stealthily, not on TV, and don’t jump all over them before you have the whole story. (To Sammi’s credit, Ronnie was lying to her, just not about this.)

3. The Situation
Okay, Mike loves gossip, and he drinks a disgusting sip of his beer in the middle of the night (where’s your Gatorade when you need it?), but this episode, The Sitch acted like a semi-stand-up guy. He advises Ronnie to tell Sammi the truth (at one point, though at another point he tells him to lie: “There’s no such thing as kissing!”), he attempts to cook the house a meal of “chicken, steak, and pasta,” and he doesn’t even get mad when Snooki knocks all his chicken to the floor (he’s relaxing in the hot tub, smoking a cigarette; clearly he’s in a good place). Okay, so he obnoxiously refers to himself as The Situation to a delivery guy, and he, like Snooki, refuses to take his sunglasses off inside. Also, he makes out with a girl at a club, then laughs at her as she tumbles off the couch, flashing her crotch to America. But overall, Mike had a pretty classy episode. He taught us about “the shirt before the shirt,” which he wears so as not to mess up his, um, vibrant going-out shirt, and surprisingly, he stayed away from Angelina’s drunken craziness. Kudos to Mike!

2. Pauly D
Pauly D! Pauly D! Pauly was on fire this episode. “We’re promoting a grenade-free America,” he tells us, hilariously, though it doesn’t really seem that way when he’s out at the club. And, fine, he doesn’t grasp why he has to wear a hair-cap at the gelato place: “My boss seems to think that my hair is going to fall off and go into the ice cream. This hair ain’t moving, my dude. 150 miles per hour on the highway on a street bike, it doesn’t move. What makes you think it’s going to move in a gelato shop?” Can you blame him? But on the side of classiness: Pauly uses an all-over body spray to smell fresh for the ladies, he sweetly talks on the phone with his friend Big Mike, and most important, he resists totally flipping out when Angelina hits him. That is class if we’ve ever seen it.

1. Vinny — The Winner!
Will Vinny win this every week? Perhaps. He’s somewhat aghast at Ronnie’s bad behavior, he tries to get Mike to stop spilling the beans, and, most endearing, he teaches Snooki how to clean up the spilled chicken. Eh, so he’s a misogynist: “I’m teaching you how to be a woman! If you’re going to be my wife one day, you gotta learn how to at least clean up.” He won’t give Snooki his pickle, which would have been the polite thing to do, and he wants to cook the chicken even after it’s been on the floor (it’s not about the germs, Vin, it’s about the dirt). And yet, in this crowd, these are minor offenses, and so Vinny takes the prize for the classiest Jersey Shore cast member of the week. Congrats!

Jersey Shore Recap