costumes | MacGuffin and Puffin

Dear Puffin,

I have never watched The Jersey Shore. I have no desire to watch The Jersey Shore. I could care less about The Jersey Shore. I do, however, have a profound desire to Oscar Wilde-ify everything I come across in life, which may explain why my vocabulary inexplicably expands the moment I get even the slightest bit inebriated. You remember the penguin joke incident of 2006, I’m sure. Hence my utter delight at finding these videos from Playbill: transcripts from The Jersey Shore preformed in the style of Oscar Wilde, by the cast of the current Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

The lads of Broadway’s The Importance of Being Earnest — namely Santino Fontana and David Furr — have created a video series exclusively for Playbill, asking the question: What if Oscar Wilde’s famed comedy-of-manners characters talked trash instead of epigrams?

Fontana (as Algernon Moncrieff) and Furr (as John Worthing) swiped real lines from the reality series “Jersey Shore” — MTV’s thick slice of Italian-American stereotype mixed with twentysomething testosterone, booze and pasta — and dressed up in their Victorian best to deliver the lines.

“Jersey Shore Gone Wilde,” a five-part video series, launched April 18 on Playbill.com. It was shot in the lobby of the American Airlines Theatre, where the acclaimed and extended Brian Bedford-directed revival of the classic plays. A new chapter launches daily through April 22.

From the Playbill write-up, here.