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The Schmooze

Zach Braff Thinks He Looks Like The New “Bachelor.” He Doesn’t.

‘The Bachelor,” a live-sex TV show experts continue to believe may be a Zimbardo Prison-type social experiment turned unexpectedly lucrative, has cast its new leading man. Like bachelors of seasons past, the incoming Arie Luyendyk Jr. is a shark-eyed white with perpetually moist lips who shimmers slightly in direct lighting. You would pretend to be dead if he came up to you in a bar, but you’re still willing to watch a TV show where producers get women drunk enough to want to marry him. He’s Arie Luyendyk Jr. for godssakes! People magazine calls him a “professional auto racing driver turned real estate agent.”

Arie Luyendyk Jr, former racer driver, current realtor, future bachelor No. 22, is a man whom we have met before (literally, he was on Season 8 of “The Bachelorette”). No one could ever confuse him with a weepy, meep-y, Kickstarter enthusiast named Zach Braff. Luyendyk Jr. is a tousled-haired Arizonian. Braff starred on Broadway in an unsuccessful Woody Allen musical. Luyendyk has “Jr.” at the end of his name. Braff’s full name is the immensely punchable “Zachary Israel Braff.”

Luyendyk races cars. Braff races all other men to be the one who annoys me the most. They could not be easier to tell apart.

Not so, according to Braff and 9.7 thousand other people who find the sweet embrace of delusion the best bet for self-preservation in these trying times. Braff joyfully tweeted about the so-called resemblance today, indicating also that he would like to go to the off-screen “Bachelor” rooms where female contestants, one by one, are pressured to have sex with bachelors to prove their allegiance.

Zach Braff, I am not trying to be mean. You are an attractive man with a long and successful career. But heed me now.

You ruined mine and every other short Jewish brunette girl’s life with the movie “Garden State,” which taught weedy young men that true love is watching a beautiful pathological liar with epilepsy conduct a funeral for a hamster. On behalf of myself and women everywhere forced to spend the greater part of the 2000s listening to the “Garden State” soundtrack, I do not accept your premise that you look like Arie Luyendyk Jr. And no, that is not my quirky pathological dishonesty talking.

Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @jeanvaljenny

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