It’s so easy to make fun of “Joe Millionaire,” the latest Fox TV reality show, that I almost feel guilty doing so.

Almost.

The premise alone — that a tall, handsome and somewhat goofy construction worker earning $19,000 a year can pretend to be a dashing millionaire in search of a wife — is fodder enough for a good laugh.

That 20 ostensibly bright women would quit their jobs as bankers, flight attendants or personal assistants to participate in a televised meat market is equally preposterous. Even if they do get to hang out in a French chateau.

The guy doesn’t know his forklift from his foie gras. He’s gonna pull off this prime-time Pygmalion? Does he really believe one special “girl” — they are not called women on this show — is going to look past the butler and the jewels and the promise of a lifetime of wealth to see him for who he really is?

And when she finds out, that she’s still going to want him?

Like I said, it’s too easy.

Harder will be to persuade you that this show, which made its debut last Monday and will continue for six weekly installments, is a modern-day morality play, a test of virtue not only of the girls and their guy, but also of viewers who, like me, are silly or curious enough to tune in.

“Joe Millionaire” and other reality shows are not about reality at all. Instead they present a massaged, manipulated, stage-managed “story” with the underlying purpose of making the rest of us feel good about our values and choices in life.

“Viewers are watching a moral spectacle of the wrong kind of relationship to feel better about themselves, as confirmation of their own good choices,” says Timothy Butler, a historian at Swarthmore College. “They’re saying, ‘At least my life isn’t as shallow, materialistic and crass as these people.’ You laugh at the characters, not with them.”

“Joe Millionaire” is awfully misogynist, and no doubt some men are watching this just to see conniving women get their comeuppance as, one by one, they are summarily dismissed from the chateau, or when the “winner” eventually is told the truth. Not only are these women set up to compete fiercely for this not-so-average Joe and his alleged fortune; they also are forced to fight each other for crumbs along the way.

There are, for example, only 20 gowns for the 20 women to wear to the first evening ball, and the scramble to capture the best one makes the fitting room during a sale at Loehmann’s look like a garden tea party.

But we can’t deny that there’s some truth in this unappealing representation. Ever since Jane Austen penned “Pride and Prejudice” — and probably long before — grasping women have schemed to bring a rich man to the altar.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Austen famously wrote nearly two centuries ago, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

And if today’s televised spectacle portrays the worst aspects of feminine backbiting and cat-fighting, it doesn’t show men in such a good light, either. Evan Marriott, the Virginia construction worker who exchanged a flannel shirt for a tuxedo and a horse, is a fake from the top of his curly hair to the bottom of his boots.

His dawning consciousness about the fraud he is perpetrating is equally pathetic. “As I rode off, I realized I had just started the biggest lie of my life,” he laments.

Pass me the tissues.

That said, how many men today aren’t tempted to lie or exaggerate to get a girl? How many women — even in this liberated age — don’t secretly wish a rich Prince Charming would sweep them away? There’s a reason Cinderella tales are subject to continual remakes. They may be politically incorrect, but they sure do resonate.

Human beings have been pondering the nature of love since Socrates held his symposium nearly 2,500 years ago. We expect that Fox TV is going to figure it out? Now that’s worth a laugh.

— Jane R. Eisner is a columnist for Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is jeisner@phillynews.com.