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Like ditz, Barbie has long been shorthand for a woman who focuses on her looks to the exclusion of all else.

Gilda Radner, a comic on “Saturday Night Live,” invented a new caricature: Baba Wawa, a funny-talking ditz.

This time the ditz is Muriel Tate, a New Jersey woman who comes to the Plaza to see, for the first time in nearly 17 years, her high school boyfriend, Jesse Kiplinger.

But the update of Hilary from a proud ditz to an earnest and hypercompetent cook and commentator attuned to racism in the food world also exemplifies the reboot’s superficial and tiresome bids for social relevance.

“I was a woman. I was a gay woman. I was a person who had been an activist for a long time, but had never held political office, and obviously the governor is a really big place to start. And I am an actress, which is a barely coded word for ‘bimbo’ or ‘ditz’.