Flake, cow, loser, slut, idiot, airhead, trash, penguin, creep, moron, midget, freak, Oompa-Loompa, nobody.

It’s another day in the kitchen of Andy Polizzi, volunteer firefighter, auto salvage manager and father of Nicole Polizzi, the 4-foot-9-inch Snooki, yowling star of “Jersey Shore,” and words cannot hurt him. Sticks and stones! After a season of the hit reality show about a bunch of Italian-Americans sharing a beach house, Andy Polizzi is used to the terrible stuff that people say about his little girl, and if he had to, he looks built enough under his “Papa Snooks” T-shirt to take them down.

He has welcomed a reporter into his home, a ranch in the middle of the ranchlands and big riding-tractor front lawns of Marlboro, N.Y., across the river from Poughkeepsie, amid the orchards and dairy bars off Route 9W. There’s a swimming pool in the backyard stuffed with water toys and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, the house has the snug plenitude of a man who likes his comforts close at hand. He has been divorced 10 years.

But he has to be honest, he said, folding his arms on the kitchen table: He doesn’t understand the public’s fascination with his daughter.

“When we go to venues, I like to stand out in the crowd,” he said. “She’ll be up there hooting and hollering, and I’ll say to someone, ‘What is it that draws you to my daughter? Be honest.’ Because it’s very hard for me to see what it is. She don’t sing. She don’t dance. I don’t want to say she don’t have talent …” He seemed to have his doubts. Then he shrugged. “Everyone basically says they can relate to her. I think Nicole’s just a likeable person.”

He went along in this worn rut of relatedness and just-folks-like-us celebrity bunkum — for, alas, fame has come to him, too — and then, hearing his daughter coming noisily down the hall from the garage, he said quickly, “Let me ask you: What do you think of the show and what do you think of Nicole?”

Ah.

Everybody seems to have an opinion about “Jersey Shore,” which begins its second season on MTV on Thursday night. Italian-American groups hate it because the cast members — Snooki, Mike (The Situation), Jenni (JWoww), Pauly D and the rest — are into “Guidos” and “Guidettes,” and how much gel they can pump into their hair before they make the chicken parm. In the first episode, Snooki got drunk, threw up and passed out.

The obsession about tanning and the gym has led to parodies on YouTube. Even President Barack Obama has weighed in on Snooki’s scarily dark tan, referring to it because of a proposed tanning-bed tax.

The action takes place in Seaside Heights and, at least for part of the new season, in South Beach. Since the show’s personalities are painted with broad strokes (the better for the rest of us to mock them), you accept that the housemates have no other aim than partying and avoiding a “grenade” in the hot tub (the guys’ term for an ugly chick). Clearly the series relies on the chem-lab formula used by other reality shows, in which volatile and juvenile temperaments are thrown together for fun explosions.

Yet while such behavioral snippets compelled some 4.8 million people to watch “Jersey Shore” at the end of the first season — almost triple the number of viewers for the premiere in December — the main point of outrage on blogs is that the show has absolutely no redeeming value.

“Everything about this show is super-sized — from the over-the-top hair to the over-the-top nature of the comments,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. If you can’t tell, he’s an avid fan. “‘Jersey Shore’ is brilliantly cast and, of course, Snooki is the star,” he said. “The name doesn’t hurt for a start.”

And she’s short, drawing our attention like a berserk windup toy. “And she’s so loud,” Thompson said. “Her dialect is ratcheted up 1,000 volts.”

Trying to hold a conversation with Snooki is a little like getting down on your hands and knees with a child. Sometimes you almost think you need to bribe her with a piece of candy to coax her to be more responsive. She is really only responsive to her own immediate needs and desires. She is not self-centered, but she is used to acting out and getting away with it.

“She loves to be the center of attention,” said Stephanie Greiner, a friend since childhood, who lives in Marlboro. “Nicole was also kind of a mean girl in high school. She was the boss of everybody.”

At the same time, she doesn’t exhibit normal levels of self-control for a woman her age. Her father, referring to her antics on “Jersey Shore,” said, “It’s not an act she’s putting on,” and as if to prove that, he described a recent visit by Snooki to his office: “Instead of standing at the counter and saying, ‘Can I speak to my father?’ she walks in and goes, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ And people are looking at her. It’s not an act. It’s just the way she is.”