There are a lot of Olympic events that seem silly or unnecessary, but perhaps none so much as the luge.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t really fully understand the sport, but it’s basically just sledding, right? I mean, what is the skill set necessary for being a good luger? I understand that there’s steering involved; is that all?

I know that the U.S. Luge team has been doing a ton of outreach lately to recruit more lugers, including an event on Rockefeller Plaza today allowing kids to try out a luge on a tiny little luge track. It looked like this:

Whoopee! Now if that thrilling four-foot drop isn’t going to get them interested, I don’t know what will. Maybe all those commercials that the U.S. Luge team airs showing kids sledding, and basically asking, “Hey, you ever think about sledding… IN THE OLYMPICS?”

And what’s most baffling about the luge is the two-man luge. I just can’t understand what, at all, the second guy laying on top of the first guy can add to luging other than — depending on the lugers’ orientations — to make things way more awkward or way more interesting.

How do you even meet your luge partner? Do you practice by spooning? Is there a mixer? I mean, that’s someone you better have damn good chemistry with, because he’s going to be spending a lot of time speeding down an icy path while laying on top of you wearing a skin-tight unitard.

Little-known fact: I’m something of an expert in Table Tennis.

I don’t mean in terms of actually playing the game. I’m just OK at that. What I mean is that I’m probably one of the very few people to have ever been paid to write articles about table tennis, thanks to my old job editing the now-defunct WCSN.com.

And though that website’s new home at Universal Sports has archived such hilarious masterpieces as “Wathelet shocks show jumping world” (read it, it’s pretty amazing), for whatever reason my numerous articles on the techniques and history of table tennis are now somehow no longer available on the Internet.

Anyway, I think table tennis is fun as hell, because it is. And when I read an item in the Daily News’ Gatecrasher section today that the cast of Gossip Girl was seen at Susan Sarandon’s new table-tennis club, I was intrigued.

Now I recognize that I’m not exactly running in the same social circles as the cast of Gossip Girl and any club they’re hanging out at is probably not my speed, but I figured maybe that would be a cool trend to trickle downhill to schlubs like me: a bar filled with Ping-Pong tables.

Why not? All my favorite bars are the ones with something to entertain me in them (besides, you know, booze), like a pool table or skee-ball machine or even, in times of desperation, Trivia Whiz or Photo Hunt.

And Ping-Pong is more fun than all of those things, with the possible exception of skee-ball, so having a bar where I could play it would be sweet. Plus it’d become a pretty obvious place to host beer-pong tournaments, which I never participate in but frequently bet on at parties.

But it turns out, Susan Sarandon’s new table-tennis club is not a “club” in the bar sense of the term “club,” but a “club” like a golf club or a polo club. Check it out: It costs $1000 to join.

Look, Susan Sarandon: Table tennis is awesome. We all agree on that. But part of what makes it awesome is that it’s kind of silly. Yes, it’s really fun to posture after Ping-Pong matches and act like you’ve won something actually important. But it’s not something actually important. It’s Ping-Pong. And you’ve taken that posturing way too far, Susan Sarandon.

And yeah, I recognize that it’s played on the Olympic level and it’s taken really seriously in places that are not the U.S. or Canada. I get that. But people take show jumping and curling and the two-man luge seriously, and those are all really silly too.

Oh, and apropos of nothing other than the interplay between Ping-Pong and sillyness: One of China’s top table-tennis players is named Wang Liqin. No disrespect, but how unfortunate.