West Chester, PA, Considers Its Legacy
West Chester, PA, was known as the “Athens of Pennsylvania” in the 19th century for its proliferation of Greek Revival architecture — columned facades, pediments, cornices, the whole democratic dream rendered in locally quarried limestone. It was, by any measure, an aspirational place.
Today West Chester is known as the home of Tires, a laddish Netflix comedy series set in a tire shop, and the spiritual birthplace of Jackass, the franchise built on the proposition that human suffering is funny if the victim consents, the camera is running, and there is a chance of serious injury.
Justin Quarrels, Ph.D, associate professor of cultural sociology at West Chester University, has noticed this juxtaposition between West Chester the Good and West Chester the Gross. In his thirty-four-page paper “Nihilism as Municipal Identity: Comic Deviance and the Post-Agrarian Pennsylvania Psyche,” published last month in the Journal of Applied Cultural Studies, Dr. Quarrels wrote, “What we are observing is a statistically improbable concentration of transgressive comic energy in a single mid-sized, prosperous borough. The architecture says Pericles. The content says penis jokes.”
Dr. Quarrels spent three years on his study. He has a grant. He has a grad assistant. He has a fourteen-variable regression model that he describes, without irony, as “elegant.”
His paper argues that West Chester’s veneer of civic respectability — the university, the gastropubs, the functioning downtown — creates what he calls “a pressure vessel of suppressed absurdism,” which eventually finds release through men who film each other being hit in the groin.
Bam Margera, the troubled Jackass star, grew up in nearby West Chester Township. His formal education, Dr. Quarrels notes carefully, “appears to have been abbreviated, which explains his glorification of sixth grade humor.”
Tires star Shane Gillis, on the other hand, actually attended West Chester University before departing to build a career on the comedy that Dr. Quarrels finds most troubling: the kind that does not want anything, does not argue anything, and is not sorry about any of it.
“Gillis sat in classrooms on this campus,” Dr. Quarrels says, pausing as if the thought still unsettled him. “He was proximate to ideas.”
A junior outside Sykes Student Union, asked to comment on Dr. Quarrels’ thesis about Tires, said she loved the show but had not heard of Dr. Quarrels.
“Is he the one who teaches at night?” she asked.
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