History Will Remember This as the Year of “Dance Your @ss Off”

It was long thought that no one wanted to watch fat people dance.  The spectacle is not pleasurable in any identifiable way.  You could call it funny, I suppose, but it’s the kind of funny that only makes you hate others, and yourself.

And yet 80% of the success of the internet is owed to fat people dancing.  Additionally, a remarkable 96% of the success of television is owed to people either dancing or being fat.  So in its way, Dance Your @ss Off is the keystone that completes the span of our culture.  The Missing Link.  The Holy Grail.  The One Ring.  It is our Guernica.

One of the judges, a nice, prim, smirky little man with no hair, describes the show thus, and while he speaks for himself, he really speaks for all of us: ”It’s a show with no clear winner, $100,000 up for grabs, people overweight losing weight, learning to dance, and the best thing: we’re judging them.”  

Oxygen’s abstract for the concept elaborates:

Bringing dance and diet together, Dance Your @ss Off features talented, full-figured contestants who will have to lose to win. Each contestant is paired with a professional dance partner who will train him or her for weekly stage performances — ranging from Hip Hop, to Ballroom and even Pole Dancing! Then they shake and rattle their rolls in front of a live studio audience and a panel of expert judges.

You can bet that somewhere, right now, there’s a “professional dance partner” burying his face in his hands and asking God why he didn’t listen to his father and get that MBA.

Tonight is the first episode of Dance Your @ss Off, at 10/9 C.  How many teary breakdowns will we see?  Insiders say four.

A smorgasbord of fat people dancing clips at People and Oxygen’s website.