Disgraced TV chef Paula Deen built an empire on butter and oil before her virulently racist comments came to the fore. Now, she’s pretty much a pop-culture curiosity, but the lady still has to make a living. If that means going on Evine Live, a cable shopping network, and hawking some oversized, baggy blouses in shades like “oatmeal,” so be it. But Deen’s eccentricities cannot be contained, regardless of the circumstances. This is a deeply strange, sad woman, seemingly never more than 30 seconds away from a total meltdown. The video pranksters at Super Deluxe have taken the liberty of remixing some of Deen’s home-shopping adventures in a new video entitled “Is Everything Okay With Paula Deen.” It soon becomes apparent that, no, everything is not okay with Paula Deen. She has “dry eyes, y’all,” for one thing. She’s fixing to lose a contact lens. And, worst of all, she can’t seem to stick to the topic at hand, which is clothing. Instead, she goes off on weird, unmotivated tangents about how blue and white are “God’s colors.” She also starts rambling on about divorced, uneducated women for some reason. Pity the Evine hostesses and models who have to soldier on bravely during all of this.
Super Deluxe’s video saboteurs give Deen their usual, unflattering treatment, adding distortion effects, echo, and artificial zoom-ins to emphasize the insanity here. But, in truth, there’s little they need to do. Deen herself brings the crazy just fine on her own. Her nasal Georgia twang seems comically exaggerated at times. “Y’all” becomes “yaww” in Deen-speak. It’s like some weird accent that only she has, perhaps developed after years of isolation from the rest of society. Despite all the discomfort they cause her, Deen’s bluer-than-blue eyes are still a source of pride for the domestic doyenne, so she lavishes mascara on them and opens them as wide as they’ll go. Her blindingly white teeth, too, are shown off through maniacal grins. In short, Deen looks like a Batman or Dick Tracy villain who somehow wound up with her own home-shopping gig.