The Creator of the J.D. Vance Couch Joke Has Zero Regrets
Even after rumors of a Simpsons-esque dolphin fetish surfaced online, a story about J.D. Vance’s penchant for couch-humping continues to dog the vice presidential candidate. Sure the story is clearly untrue, but nobody seems to mind.
The joke’s longevity has now been further extended by Vance himself, after he made a comment about his wife forcing him to sleep on the couch. It’s unclear how many injuries were sustained by people frantically rushing to their devices to make jokes.
The Vance rumor clearly began as a joke, an easily-debunkable claim on social media that the 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis contained a graphic remembrance of the time Vance got intimate with “an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions.” In retrospect, it’s too bad that we never got to see this scene brought to life by Oscar-winning filmmaker Ron Howard.
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The user behind the claim, @rickrudecalves, ended up deleting their account soon after after the joke took on a life of its own — not just on social media, but on cable news, where Fox News host Jesse Watters demanded to see video evidence of a teenage J.D. Vance defiling a chesterfield.
Even Kamala Harris’ campaign account has made subtle references to the rumors.
But now the architect of the funniest political scandal of the year is speaking out. And he doesn’t seem to be too regretful about all that’s happened. As “Rick” told Business Insider, “I have really enjoyed thinking about (Vance’s) team and all of the idiots associated with him having to grapple with this,” adding, “I think by the time the AP (fact check) came out, I was talking to one of my sisters and saying, ‘Oh, yeah, Trump is already calling him a couch-fucker.’”
In his defense, Rick namechecked Werner Herzog, stating that the couch rumors represent what Herzog calls an “ecstatic truth,” which the legendary director describes as “a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual.”
Rick also revealed the origin of the fake story, which apparently had nothing to do with the hormonal exploits of Jason Biggs. According to Rick, he was inspired by Lyndon Johnson’s infamous (perhaps apocryphal) “pig fucker” strategy, in which he asked his campaign manager to invent a salacious pork-based rumor about a political opponent, as recounted in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72.
Johnson supposedly knew that such an allegation was wildly untrue, but he wanted to “make the sonofabitch deny it,” which could explain why Vance has yet to deny the rumors about his furniture kink.
Rick including fake page numbers in his post, making the Vance story both believable and extremely easy to double-check, owes a debt to literary greats like Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles, who similarly played with fictional citations. “It’s something I’ve found funny my entire life,” the former English major claimed.
Although as far as we know, The French Lieutenant's Woman contained no references to sofa sex.
You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).
