Some people know how to work the dumb angle to their benefit. A great example would be Jessica Simpson. She’s worked her lack of intellect every which way and made a good deal of money from it. But she’s what we’d call “regular dumb” – she’s just a little less bright than your average person, but not exceptionally dumb. She’s not so dumb that she’s clueless about her stupidity. Anna Nicole Smith – may she rest – was a bit clueless. She couldn’t really work the dumb angle to her advantage, because she was too dumb to figure out how. Instead it worked against her. Kellie Pickler seems to be right in between Jessica Simpson and Anna Nicole on the dumb scale. Sometimes you’ll see her say something, and it seems like she’s trying to play it up for laughs. But other times you get the feeling that she’s genuinely a few marbles short of a Hungry Hungry Hippos game. Last week Kellie was on “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” I’ve never seen the show before, but I’m absolutely sure I reached my intellectual peak in fifth grade, so I presume the point of the show is to make the contestants feel stupid.

Kellie certainly managed to look stupid – but something tells me she didn’t quite understand that. During her exchanges with host Jeff Foxworthy, she asked him (in all seriousness – she didn’t appear to be trying to make a joke) if Europe was a country, didn’t know what Budapest was the capitol of – though she thought it might be France – and then was confused if France really was a country or not. She seemed to be thinking out loud in a stream of consciousness fashion, and at some point talked herself into being quite sure that the one thing she DID know about Budapest is that they speak French there. And that was pretty much all she was sure about. Oh, and she’s never heard of Hungary. Turkey she’s heard of. But she seemed to think Jeff Foxworthy was pulling her leg on Hungary.

I know Kellie Pickler had a really hard childhood and probably had bigger things to worry about than geography. I’m not going to fault her for that. But write a check to charity – don’t go on a national game show to demonstrate to everyone that you’re a ditz. Blonds of the world, we need to unite. We need to organize. Women like Jessica Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, and Kellie Pickler are sending us back to the dark ages – the 1980s – when blond jokes ran amuck. Haven’t we worked too hard to overcome these ditzy stereotypes? No? Alright then. I’m going to go see how long it takes me to screw in a light bulb. Man I hate blond jokes.