'Spoons are so brutal!' Paris Hilton's cooking show is a rare work of comic genius

To watch Cooking with Paris, Paris Hilton’s new foray into the world of online culinary demonstration, is to ask yourself one thing over and over again: is Paris Hilton a genius?

Because, over the course of this 15-minute YouTube video, Paris Hilton cooks a lasagne. That’s all she does. And a lasagne is one of the easiest things in the world to cook. It would be impossible to make the act of lasagne assembly look even slightly entertaining if this were Jamie or Nigella. But impossible means nothing to a woman like Paris Hilton. Her lasagne preparation method, you see, is almost indescribable.

Sashaying into her kitchen holding a little dog dressed as a French maid, Paris greets us by saying: “As you all know – well, maybe not all of you know – people who do know know that I’m an amazing cook.” It’s a 21-word sentence and the first 17 are entirely redundant. All she needed to say was “I’m an amazing cook.”

And she is. So long as you remember that ‘amazing’ doesn’t mean ‘good’, or even ‘enthusiastic’. At the very first hurdle – preparing the lasagne sheets – Paris realises she’s been supplied with ones that need to be boiled, and she complains. She shows us all the ricotta she’ll be using, then tells us not to use as much as her. She realises that her mozzarella doesn’t come pre-grated, and sighs with such deep resignation you think she might be about to jack the whole thing in. “This is so brutal” she complains, before discarding an almost untouched block of cheese for fear that the grater will destroy her fingers.

She takes a photograph of her ingredients and tweets it, instructing us in no uncertain terms never to use the hashtag #Parislasagne when referring to her. She doesn’t know what ricotta looks like. She holds up a spatula and says “I don’t know what this is”. Spoons, she declares, are “brutal”. She wets kitchen roll with bottled water. She does something with salt that I won’t tell you for fear that I’ll be chased out of town as a liar.

Even from a cleanliness perspective, Cooking with Paris is incredible. For instance, she favours gloves in the kitchen – but not just any glove. She prefers the sort of fingerless mittens that weightlifters use, claiming that they’re usually used for sliving, which I am almost entirely convinced is not a word, and wears them while her untied, waist-length hair swishes dangerously close to every single ingredient she touches.

But here’s the thing: I have no idea if Cooking with Paris is a joke or not. It looks like it is probably a vanity project by a dangerously out-of-touch rich lady. But at the same time it’s too diligent not to be. Every time an opportunity for stupidity arises – literally every single time – Paris Hilton manages to rise up and hit the target. A genuine idiot wouldn’t make this much of a hash of a lasagne, but this is basically a Mr Bean video. Trained scientists could parse Cooking with Paris for traces of self-awareness and come up none the wiser.

It’s all so baffling. Who is this video for? Why was it made? What does Paris Hilton hope to achieve with it? Why did she call her dog Diamond Baby? Why does she make such a big deal about all the slogan tea towels she owns? What, in the holy name of the lord above, is sliving?

I do not know. All I know is that I got inordinately excited when Paris Hilton ended the video by telling us that this would not be a one-off and asked what she should cook next. Consider me subscribed.