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.
But Fake Steve Jobs’ “poetry corner” sometimes recalls the best of WASP’s Nest on Veiled Conceit:
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/01/sometimes-i-feel-like-golden-god.html
— Maureen · Mar 17, 02:57 AM · #
There are many things to dislike about that blog; it’s kind of overly-broad snark is only seen as biting because it invokes race-danger. There’s a lot to be said about it, but most of it is pretty tiresome. I think you’ve hit on the most important point, which is that it accesses a profoundly white perspective to make its supposedly caustic observations on white culture. I have no idea about the race of the site’s creator, but it’s immaterial— particularly when he or she has engaged so enthusiastically in dividing racial culture from mundane concerns like actual racial identity.
What I find particularly troubling is the political incoherence. One of the political visions of the site, such as they are, is that white people claim sympathy and solidarity with the poor, but work to keep nonwhite people in poverty. But what, really, is the blog a critique of? Precisely the bourgeois foibles that come with wealth. And as much as I may feel aesthetic revulsion to many of those foibles that are chronicled on the blog, I have to recognize that raising poor people out of poverty will inevitable include propagating those values. I think in a sense the blog does precisely what it complains about white people doing, claiming to support the poor but expecting them to remain in poverty. It purports to support wealth creation for the nonwhite, but it defines wealth and upper-class identity as an aspect of whiteness.
— Freddie · Mar 17, 03:12 AM · #
Oh come, it’s generally delightful. There are elements which are tone deaf, for sure, but there’s as much (or more) that’s just spot on. Indeed, sometimes the two are combined as in the Obama listing (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/8-barack-obama/) where the text is asinine, but the photoshop priceless…
— Ben A · Mar 17, 04:31 AM · #
The reason people like stuffwhitepeoplelike is that is gets everything about the white culture it’s lampooning right. Every other mockery of that culture I’ve seen gets some things wrong, usually a lot of things wrong. It could be more clever, but right now it has no competition.
Freddie, why should everyone with any wealth need to adopt the aesthetic markers the upper class currently uses to distinguish itself?
— Brendan · Mar 17, 06:16 AM · #
What a rambling, incoherent, sour-grapes post. If you want to say they aren’t being original, the correct work to cite is David Brook’s Bobos in Paradise. Veiled Conceit is funny, but over-the-top NY Times wedding announcements are obviously meant to be drenched in chutzpah and have a self-referential sense of irony. That’s not the sort of thing being parodied by SWPL. (although, perhaps ironically, NY Times wedding announcements would be appropriate as a post to SWPL)
— Shiloh · Mar 19, 04:52 AM · #
SWPL should be titled Stuff White Liberal Yuppies Like. I guess if you live in NYC or LA it might have some accuracy. It misses the mark for the rest of the USA. Maybe, this is not a concern of this author.
How does it miss the mark? Liberal White Guilt isn’t so pernicious in the real world. Since many Liberals are militant secularists, White Guilt and Anti-Patriotism are their replacement beliefs. This proves the adage that those who don’t believe in God will believe in anything.
— alice moore · Mar 22, 11:38 AM · #
This site is better.
http://stuffwhiteparentslike.com
— Kim · Mar 30, 11:24 PM · #