Upsetting Day: CAKE! SLAP!

The most epic battle I’ve ever seen wasn’t a bar fight, a UFC match, or two raccoons fighting over a wig behind a dumpster. It’s the absolute bliss with which the women of the TV show Bridezillas fight their own wedding cakes.

Bridezillas is an institution. It had a very cursed thirteen seasons of television. Its spinoff Marriage Boot Camp is still airing today in multiple countries and has a massive twenty seasons on US television. Today marriage boot camp comes in many flavors, but it was originally designed for couples whose marriages were in jeopardy after going on the show Bridezillas. This is a little bit like getting stitches from the guy who just kicked the crap out of you.

Of course, the bridezillas were aware they were on the show Bridezillas. They’re not being covertly filmed as the show would like you to believe, but the rage they feel is clearly authentic.

Bridezillas is acutely aware that the funniest thing that can possibly happen is a bride punching her wedding cake. Cake violence is the violence I advocate. I can’t pinpoint why it’s so funny, maybe because the wedding cake is a towering monument to delicate femininity. It’s sugary, fragile, a bright virginal white, and seeing a woman who’s expected to embody all of the qualities of a delicious cake wreck that shit in a blind barbarian rage is so satisfying.

I don’t like watching women be mean to their relatives, which is the central tenet of Bridezillas, but it’s all part of the show. The bride is angry. She’s screaming at someone, and she knows she’s not going to get the thing she wants from them no matter how hard she yells, but oh, what’s this…so close to her, a perfect outlet for her matrimonial rage practically glistening in all of its delicious glory. Its white frosting so calm and undisturbed by any bridal woes. This cake must pay.

Each cake attack is a master class in horror movie suspense. “If I see one fucking petal on my wedding cake, I’ll lose it,” Paige tells the camera. We then cut to Paige’s Mom saying. “I wish she would just trust my vision a little more with the cake.” Uh oh, Paige is about to fucking lose it.

The mother approaches the cake baker, a poor innocent in this interaction. “You and I both know that she agreed to flowers on the cake, and I just know that if she saw them, she’d love it,” Paige’s mother says.

The baker gently touches her arm and replies with such kindness and also such deep fear and confusion. "She…she didn't want them. She was bound and determined not to have them." The baker's eyes contain a premonition of the coming cake death.

The Mother replies, "yeeeaaaaaahhhh." Then we cut to that cake getting so many freak out petals basted across it as the baker continues to beg her not to do this. The baker is the only one who understands they are in hell. She is the only one awake in this purgatory. We then cut to the camera, stalking Paige as though she's a yeti. We cut from the cake to Paige, the cake to Paige, and then BAM.

That poor defenseless cake never stood a chance. Sure, you could simply remove the flowers from the cake, but she would know their essence was there, and it's not about the flowers after all. Like Brad Pitt standing over the remains of Jared Leto's face in Fight Club, she felt like destroying something beautiful.

There are a few times on Bridezillas when the destruction of a wedding cake was more warranted. When I watched a bride get into the back seat of her friend's car holding two unboxed cakes and screaming, “Don’t fuck with my cakes, drive slow,” as she precariously balances an oreo cookie cake on a single hand I know what’s coming and yet the joke is not ruined at all. I’m thrilled.

Naturally, as the bride hands off the cake to the maid of honor, she screams about how precious and flimsy the cake is and how they need to be so, so cautious because if anything happens to this cake, she will simply be crushed. Then, off screen, someone must have come by and hit her with the mind wiping device from Men In Black because she hucks that beautiful, frail confection to her maid of honor like Tom Brady throwing a football made of titanium. How could this have happened?

The maid of honor then picks the cake up off of the ground and begins frantically smooshing the icing back onto it with the manic energy of someone desperate not to get what this cake has coming to it. No one will notice a little bit of gravel in the frosting, right? Unfortunately, almost nothing can be fixed by scraping a cake out of the gutter. The bride swats that cake out of her hand like an angry cat. Cake over.

Still, nothing compares to Valerie, Bridezilla's number one cake puncher. This is the cake punch that got me hooked on cake punching. When I try to sell the merits of an adult woman body slamming her own wedding cake WWE style, this is the clip I usually show them:

It's such a simple misunderstanding. Valerie swears she ordered a chocolate cake for her wedding day. The baker is certain she did not and is already pissed at Valerie for showing up two and a half hours late to pick up her cake. They have a civil disagreement at first, but at some point, a switch flips in Valerie's head, and she starts looking at this cake like she caught it sniffing her underwear. It's not just a vanilla cake anymore. It's disappointment incarnate.

Valerie starts to subtly imply she may die if she has to eat this vanilla cake. She's one hundred percent serious about this. "I feel like really stressed out. Like, I feel like I'm gonna have a freakin' anxiety attack. Like, you're gonna have to call a freakin' ambulance." I can't stress to you how upsettingly vanilla this cake is. It's so vanilla it's going to kill a woman.

The baker offers to compromise and brings Valerie a chocolate sheet cake in addition to the completed vanilla cake that’s already completed. She explains that it takes eight hours to bake a tiered wedding cake and there isn’t time to bake another one. This is a great compromise in an absolutely insane situation, so naturally, Valerie goes full Incredible Hulk. She starts screaming, “I want my chocolate cake. This is not what I asked for,” (again it is what she asked for). When no chocolate cake appears Valarie open palm karate slams the vanilla cake. Which, again, looks like this:

She really gets it in between her fingers, and is in such a hurry to leave after this outburst she ends up running away with a fistful of vanilla cake clutched in her palm, a Hansel and Gretel trail of icing dripping behind her. It's little details like that which make this cake punch a classic.

Now you might be one of those Johnny Naysayers going, "This is so staged. Why didn't she punch the big cake? It was right there and a much more punchable target. It's almost like they put this tiny cake off to the side like a birthday magician specifically for punching purposes. To which I say: you know what else is fake? Every gang trying to kill Jackie Chan. Professional wrestling. Hopefully magicians. Everybody loves to watch people pretend to fight each other, but none of those guys are even a little bit cake? Why?

This is my pro wrestling. A woman and a cake enter the ring. Sure, I know who's leaving the victor, but it's about the performance, not the outcome. If we could somehow combine pro wrestling and Is It Cake? that would be the best show on television. Imagine Stone Cold Steve Austin jumping from the top of the ring onto Roman Reigns and him exploding into a pile of icing. “It was me Austin! I was the cake all along.”

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