“Real Housewives of Atlanta” is unintentionally hilarious

A few days ago I was really and truly bored, and decided to watch some television.  I ran across one show I would never normally watch, called “The Real Housewives of Atlanta”.

Apparently this series shows “real housewives”, but not of the house-dress and broom-and-mop variety.  No sir, these woman are so wealthy that top name designers send boxes and boxes of shoes, purses etc to their houses on approval.  They’re all either married to or otherwise involved with wealthy men, and they all seem to spend far more time gossiping about each other than they do taking care of their own children (why raise your children when you can just hire a nanny and a governess to do it for you, right?)  

Well okay, in all fairness there is one woman on the show who seems to be a businesswoman in her own right.  The others, though, are not.  

I have never known any “real” housewife to live like that (except the gossiping, which is common regardless of socioeconomic status, but these women take even that to a whole new level given that they know they are being recorded for national television).  This series would therefore be more correctly called “Ladies Who Lunch and Stab Each Other In The Back”.

Needless to say, it’s not exactly my cup’o'tea, and not something I would normally watch.  However, it didn’t take long for me to figure out that Real Housewives is one of the most unintentionally funny shows I have ever seen.  

The show revolves around five wealthy Atlanta-area women.  Two are married to professional athletes (DeShawn Snow, wife of NBA player Eric Snow, and Lisa Wu Hartwell, wife of NFL player Ed Hartwell), one is in the process of divorcing a professional athlete (Sheree Whitfield, married to NFL player Bob Whitfield), and one is married to a real estate investor (NeNe Leakes, married to Gregg Leakes).  

Kim Zolciak

There is one woman in particular on that show, Kim Zolciak (divorced, it’s unclear who she was married to but they’ve been divorced for years), who just absolutely cracks me up.  Problem is, she doesn’t intend to be funny at all.  

Kim is completely struck on herself.  She is also not very intelligent at all, as is obvious every single time she opens her mouth to speak.  She is so arrogant, in fact, that she thinks she should be able to just walk into a recording studio and record a hit album (back to that in a moment).  Her mysterious boyfriend (who we never see, and who is referred to on the show only as “Big Papa”) lets her spend his money like it’s water.  She says he does it because he likes to see her happy, so apparently money really does buy happiness.  In the first or second episode, she woke up, had her personal stylists do her hair and makeup, and decided to buy a new car.  So she calls up Big Papa, and tells him she wants a Cadillac Escalade.  She goes out and buys one that very day, with Big Papa’s money.  In another episode, she bought an outrageously expensive cuff bracelet with Big Papa’s money.  She says in yet another epsiode that she doesn’t normally wear panties, but that Big Papa likes big panties.

Of course, if she were poor, she would be called a “prostitute” rather than a “housewife”.

Big Papa apparently knows a lot of very wealthy and talented people, which is not unusual when one walks in those circles, and Kim decided she wanted to be a country singer.  Her friends were all very surprised, because it seems that none of them ever remember hearing her sing.

When your friends don’t recall ever hearing you sing, either you can’t sing, or you’re kind enough to not inflict your voice on others, or both.  Take your choice.  If you had a voice which might produce a hit record, someone is going to remember hearing you sing, even if only along with the radio.

So Big Papa set her up with an Atlanta-area record producer named Dallas Austin.  It is said that he has produced some of the biggest names in the business, and Wikipedia shows that he has produced Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Boys II Men, TLC, and others, so those are indeed very big names.  

Once she decides to become a singing sensation, everything Kim says is ‘Dallas this, Dallas that’, to the point that her friends are all getting annoyed (though of course she thinks they are just jealous of her fabulous talent which they have never heard).  NeNe even drunkenly makes up a song about how Kim is delusional liar (and NeNe can actually sing, by the way, but of course the ditty makes it back to Kim, which makes for a lot of drama).  

Eventually she decides to go through with making a hit record.  Dallas, who obviously has an interest in not embarrassing himself, sends her to a voice coach, telling Kim that he sends everyone to a voice coach.

I suspect he did not send Madonna or Boys II Men to a voice coach, though.

The voice coach very quickly ascertains, as does every single person with ears, that Kim is not only completely tone deaf, she also sings through her nose.  So not only is she a bad singer, she is an embarrassingly bad singer.  Her singing is so bad, in fact, that she even embarrasses herself singing karaoke.  Here’s a video someone took in New York, showing Kim (the blonde) singing karaoke with a friend.

Yet Kim cannot understand why she can’t just make a hit record anyway.  See, she thinks the voice coach is just making things up when she says Kim doesn’t know what she’s doing (she actually came right out and said that, LOL).  It never even occurs to her that the voice coach knows more about singing than she does.  The voice coach played a few notes on a piano, and Kim was supposed to match those notes.  She misses every single note, and she misses them very badly.  So when the voice coach points out that Kim can’t hit any of the notes, Kim asks how that would come into play in making a record.  There is a stunned silence, then the voice coach tells her that it would help with singing the right notes.

Kim, however, is not to be deterred.  She says that she doesn’t need to understand the ABCs of singing, because she is a singer.  I guess that means I’m a singer too, because I sing in the shower.  LOL

Eventually Dallas records about half a song, and has it played back so Kim can hear what everyone else hears.  This woman has apparently never even listened to herself prior to going into a recording studio, if you can believe that.  When she resists hearing the playback again, likely because even she realizes how bad it really was, he tells her that she has to listen to herself because that’s how you know what you need to change.  He also made a comment on camera away from Kim, saying that it had to be done that way rather than waste everybody’s time.

That was a really nice way of saying she can’t sing, and probably shouldn’t even be singing in the shower.  Yet Kim seems to think that she can be taught the ABCs of singing, and all will be well; she will record her number one hit song, and be loved by millions.

Okay, so that’s one mystery solved: Kim is indeed delusional.  

The mystery now is, who is “Big Papa”?  According to one interview, even most of her friends don’t know who he is.  I had assumed he was a professional athlete, based upon who the other women are married to; or perhaps a musician, based upon the Dallas Austin involvement.  

Kim’s delusions apparently know no bounds, because she says quite openly that she wants to marry Big Papa (though what she really meant to say is that she wants to marry Big Papa’s money).  Problem is, unless Big Papa is a polygamist, she can’t marry him.  According to multiple Atlanta-area sources, Big Papa is a MARRIED multi-millionaire real estate developer (I won’t name him here, out of respect for his wife and children).  There are photos of that developer with hip-hop stars such as Ne-Yo, so he probably does know Dallas Austin.  There are also, of course, photos of him with his wife, who will likely bankrupt him in a divorce settlement as a result of this very public humiliation by his dingbat mistress.

That sure would explain why they never show Big Papa, why even her girlfriends don’t (or at least didn’t) know his identity, and why they never say his name on the show.  

You can’t buy comedy like this.

In the next episode, we get to find out who is NeNe’s father.  I honestly don’t care, and I’m not sure I even want to know unless there is some unintentional comedy to be found in a DNA test.  However, I’ll tune in again, just to see what the ladies who lunch are up to while pretending to be “real housewives”.

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