‘Where’s JD Vance at?’: World’s most butt-ugly bench design might just take ‘all natural’ a step too far

These days, politics can seem unavoidable, even when shopping at Big Lots, according to a recent TikTok post. The short clip begins as the camera surveys furniture in the store, landing on a bench covered in — what else? — cowhide. Based on one small detail, though, it didn’t bring to mind farms and agriculture, but instead, JD Vance.

According to rumor, Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, wrote about having sex with a couch in his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which is just a joke. Still, Vance being in compromising situations with furniture has been the punchline since then. So, what about a Big Lots bench made one commenter think of the Ohio senator? It seemed anatomically correct, as the camera reveals, with one specifically cow-themed detail right there on the piece of furniture.

Is that what I think it is?

As the camera zooms in on the cow-themed bench, one can’t help but notice a whorl in that pattern looks very much like a cow’s anus. As one commenter rightly pointed out, it likely wasn’t the cow’s actual anus staring back at viewers from the bench, but instead, the whorl in the cow’s hair, where the animal’s hair grows in different directions, just like humans have on their heads.

Still, the easy set-up wasn’t lost on many others who responded to the post. “Where’s JD Vance at?” one comment said. “@J.D. Vance Friday night plans for you,” another added. Some went a different direction with their funny comebacks, saying things like: “I was wondering where my corgi went,” noticing the similar color pattern on the bench compared to corgi fur. “Noice it comes with a coaster,” another added.

No matter what, that cowhide bench would certainly be a conversation starter at your next dinner party. But all joking aside, one has to admit that putting the likely-not-anus-but-rather-whorl front and center is a strange choice from the designer.

Big Lots is a discount retailer based in Ohio. Investigating the piece, we couldn’t find it on the Big Lots website, but we found a similar-looking bench from a different retailer that could be the same brand. Looking at those product photos, we couldn’t find the whorl, so the whorl on the bench on TikTok could have been a one-off manufacturing anomaly — a cow-anus-bench unicorn!

It does have Vance vibes, though

The Vance couch thing referenced in the aforementioned social media comments started when an X user named Rick shared the joke in a made-up X post, which you can see above. Even though it’s not true — like what that bench seems to show — it took off because Vance does have “couch sex vibes,” and the joke, borrowing the words of film director Werner Herzog, reveals the “ecstatic truth” about him as a person, as Rick told Business Insider. The same could be said for the bench.

Let’s hope the Vance campaign doesn’t stop by that Big Lots from the TikTok post — based on how things went when Vance tried to order doughnuts, a Philly cheesesteak sandwich, or shake hands with a colleague if Vance spotted the bench, things could — shall we say — be “uncomfortable.”