Whiter Shades of Pale (11 page)

Over the course of a calendar year, white people have ample opportunities for themed parties and drinking: Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day, and Cinco de Mayo are the most popular officially sanctioned holidays. But that does not mean that white people shy away from creating their own impromptu themed parties—Mustache Party! Nineties Prom!
Designing Women!

During the month of December, white people face an especially difficult challenge. This is the time of year when parties and drinking are most appropriate, but the most obvious theme (Christmas) must be avoided. Christmas forces Christianity upon others, and though their ancestors had no problem with this activity, modern white people are quite disgusted by the idea. Hanukkah parties are fun, but a bit too exclusive, and a Kwanzaa party requires an enormous amount of physical, mental, and ironic labor that can only be done by the most elite of white people.

White people needed to find a party completely free of religious affiliations but still connected enough to the idea of Christmas that they can serve eggnog and hot toddies. The answer: ugly sweater parties.

These parties feature festive drinks, Christmas music by Sufjan Stevens, and most important, intentionally hideous sweaters. These ugly
sweaters provide white people with an invisible shield that protects them from any criticism that might emerge if any Christianity accidentally slips into the evening.

“Hey man, I love that Burl Ives song, but, um, you let ‘Silent Night’ slip into the party mix. That’s kind of awkward because, you know, the Crusades?”

White person points to sweater and makes a funny face.

Order is restored.

If you find yourself invited to one of these parties, you must begin your preparations immediately. Craftier white people have been searching used clothing stores since last Christmas, so you should not expect to find anything of significant ironic value. Your best hope is to see if any of your family members has an old sweater lying around.

White people love the discipline of anthropology (see Barack Obama’s Mother) as a field of graduate study. In fact, you could probably say that white people love everything about anthropology, so when a store opens that takes the French word for the subject as its name, you can only imagine the reception.

If you are hoping to have any sort of friendship or relationship with a white woman, it is a must that you learn about Anthropologie. You might have walked past it a few times at your local mall and wondered how they crammed the interior of a late-nineteenth-century barn into a shopping center that was built in 2005.

When you step inside, the aged hardwood floor and antique birdhouses and worn furniture will transport you to a time period that never existed but is able to somehow seamlessly merge elements from disparate decades. In other words, Anthropologie is the store equivalent of a Wes Anderson film, which certainly helps to explain its appeal.

Everything they sell at this store is brand-new but looks as though it’s come from a thrift shop. So you might be wondering why white people would shop here instead of a much cheaper thrift shop. The answer is that while thrift shops will occasionally contain a gem like a perfectly worn velvet couch from the forties, for the most part they are filled with old computers, exercise equipment, and black pro wrestling T-shirts. White women do not have the time to search through racks and racks of shoulder-padded clothing to find the perfect lace dress that will likely not be in their size.

Anthropologie offers white women a thrift store with all the bad taken out (unfashionable clothes, strange smells, actual poor people) and only the good left behind. As an homage to its inspiration, the store still keeps things buried under tables and in bins that require some digging. This enables a white person to feel as though they have accomplished something by locating a knit top, but it does not prevent them from finding a similar product when they are in a hurry.

If the concept is still difficult to grasp, the simplest way to explain it is that Anthropologie is the most efficient way for white women to look and (hopefully) live like Amélie. If you have not seen
Amélie
, do so at your earliest convenience. It is essential to understanding white people.

When the time comes to provide a white woman with a gift, you can approach it from one of two angles. If she prefers clothing over home décor, you should get her a gift certificate. It will show that you understand
her. If she likes home décor, go to the store and buy something like a doorknob or salt shaker. Then tell her that you got it from an estate sale from a delightfully eccentric old woman on your street. For some unknown reason, crazy old women are universally recognized as the best former owners of stuff.

White people have loved Monty Python for quite some time now. Considering that Monty Python are British, first appeared on public television, and have gone on to create some of the most popular films in white person history, it is no surprise.

It would be normal to assume that all white people love Monty Python, but it’s simply not true. You see, there is a very large, very specific group of white people who do not find the British comedy troupe to be entertaining. They are called women.

It’s not that white women are incapable of finding the humor in Monty Python. Quite the opposite. They have all the skills needed to appreciate the jokes: understanding of absurdist humor, love of all things British, understanding of world history and high culture references. No, what has driven white women away from Monty Python is the fact that every white male they have ever met has peppered them with so many reenactments that it’s impossible to see the troupe as anything more than an annoyance.

For decades, white women have been dating men who won’t shut up about dead parrots pining for fjords, the Ministry of Silly Walks, and the
Knights Who Say Ni. If you don’t get any of these references then you are an excellent candidate to start dating a white man. As a nonwhite woman, you are very appealing to white men, in no small part because dating you would mean that they have at least two years of fresh Monty Python material with which to try to impress you.

In most normal situations, if you were going to give up your time and money to see someone put on a show, you would hope that the performers would practice, or at the very least prepare something in advance to entertain you. Not white people. For years they have been enamored with a style of humor called improv.

At its core, improv is where a bunch of white people onstage take suggestions from the audience and then make something up. It’s a bit like charades but with a cover charge.

The white person’s passion for improv begins in high school, where they will join a club of like-minded individuals. If you’ve ever looked through someone’s yearbook and thought, “What’s the easiest way to find all the nerds who are bad at math?” simply flip to the improv club’s page and you will have your answer.

As these budding improv players reach college, the passion intensifies as they break off into smaller “troupes” with wacky names. As a rule of thumb the best improv names are generally wordplays on historical figures, popular films, people, or television shows. For example the Betty White Stripes, Kirk Cameroon, or the Andrew Jackson Five. It is unknown why
white people find this wordplay to be so funny, but if you follow white people on Twitter you’ve probably already figured this out after a barrage of tweets following someone who wrote #IfBandsWereFood.

After college, white people can find improv in literally every city in America, with the main hubs being Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. White people simply cannot get enough of it, and white improv performers are willing to give up their time, money, and, for the performers, potentially lucrative careers.

When you arrive at an improv event, you will notice that the crowd is made up almost entirely of only the friends and family of the performers. As you have probably already noticed, guilt is a powerful motivator for white people, and an improv show is proof positive that even white people have figured out how to use white guilt to their advantage.

There are rumors that there are nonwhite people participating in this activity, but judging by the cast of
Saturday Night Live
and every sketch comedy show on television, this would appear to be false.