I Hate StuffWhitePeopleLike.com

Many things to blog about, but briefly — Stuff White People Like has garnered a lot of attention and praise. You might say white people like Stuff White People Like, which is a sad commentary on the state of white people. Though the website has chosen a very rich vein of comedy, it appears to be written by simpletons. Consider the late and lamented Veiled Conceit, which covered similar yet narrower terrain, in this case New York Times wedding announcements. The creator of Veiled Conceit clearly had a keen understanding of the world he was skewering, and he went far beyond the drearily obvious to go on kooked-out, Photoshop-enhanced flights of fancy. Gawker‘s coverage of the same subject matter is, in contrast, sub-fourth-rate.

And yet even Gawker far surpasses, Stuff White People Like, despite the fact that SWPL is shooting fish in a barrel. The key difference between Veiled and SWPL is that Veiled was invariably smarter than his victims. He mocked those who were, to put things as indelicately as possible, privileged yet gauche, highly educated but culturally unsavvy, with-it yet soulless, shameless, or otherwise frightening. SWPL generally attacks people who richly deserve tart satirical treatment, but he actually across as … dopier than his targets, which is saying something.

As a right-winger, I suppose I should appreciate that SWPL mainly takes on liberal pretension. If anything, though, this makes me even more critical, as I fear SWPL is making right-wingers look like boobs with its witless malapropisms and misreadings. SWPL is “in the know” by virtue of identifying dated, overfamiliar tropes (white guys like Asian girls! hyphentated names are silly!) and then making the most obvious comic hay out of them. In short, SWPL is the Family Guy of web comedy, and for that reason alone it merits summary execution, Chinese-style. No, worse: SWPL is almost as noxious a force in the culture as Heroes. Someone page Triumph: I have something for him to poop on.

In fairness, the SWPL post on shorts was mildly amusing. But is it enough to redeem the site, or to justify the praise? High standards are good for civilization. Reject the soft bigotry of low expectations. Accept only the best. Read Vulture. And I fully expect you to skip my braindead ramblings if that’s what it takes, because comedy is serious business.

Speaking of which, MGMT is pretty damn funny, and this bozo has incredibly poor reading comprehension skills. This is why you should read to your small children, my friends. My parents didn’t read to me, and to this day I spend up to half of my free time huffing mild picante fumes out of a paper bag.