Halloween Costumes That Should Not Exist (Male Edition)

“Wait, let me guess—you dressed up as a giant douchebag.”

~All of us

Halloween is a wonderful time of the year.  No, we’re not saying that sarcastically, Halloween is one of the better holidays out there—you’re not expected to do anything other than dress as something goofy, get drunk with your friends, and maybe steal some of the candy your kids got Trick-or-Treating when they’re not looking (they are guaranteed not to notice, unless you snag one of the full-sized snickers that your neighbors keep offering just to show up everyone else on the block, the bastards.)

We’ve, long ago, talked about how Halloween is the holiday that ages with you.  That might sound like an indictment, but it’s quite the opposite—almost every other holiday is so inflexible, you’re inevitably bound to have periods of your life where you don’t find them as enjoyable as you once did.  Not so with Halloween.  When you’re a kid, and want candy, boom, you’ll get to fill your little chubby cheeks with enough sugar to force us to make some diabetes joke that leads to weirdly hostile diatribes being posted on our website.  You’re in your 20’s or 30’s and would like an excuse to get smashed while dressed in 1990’s pop culture references?  All yours buddy!  Feeling like settling down, dressing up your baby as a pumpkin and having a shindig at your house?  Halloween has you covered!

It’s a great holiday.  We can’t stress that enough.  It’s great.  Great great great.

But people who buy and wear novelty costumes for it suck.  Like these following costumes.  Do not buy these costumes.  Do not suck on Halloween.

Costumes That Should Not Exist (Male Edition)

We have a hypothesis we’d like to run by you—no one who has dressed in a costume that insinuates they’re going to get laid that night has ever gotten laid on Halloween.  Yet for some reason, those costumes are everywhere, like it was decided by some higher power that women should dress in sexy costume versions of things that should not be made sexy (more on that later this week) and that men should get costumes that claim to be “hilarious” that are actually “douchey, just, so so douchey, you douchebag you.”

Sadly, there are an almost unlimited number of ways you can spend $100 for a costume that basically translates to a big flashing sign reading, “I’m a huge asshole.”  So we’re going to break these costumes up into three main categories, with the caveat that, if you read this article, and then purchase one of these goddamn costumes, you are legally signing a contract that allows us to sterilize you.

Category #1:  Embarrassingly Blunt Sexual Innuendos

When you and a significant other are making the effort to spend Halloween wearing matching costumes to ensure you can’t really leave your partner’s side if you want people to “get” what you’re dressed at, you’re looking for one of two things—you’re either trying to be cutesie nearly to the point of obnoxiousness, or hoping to show that you’re a “fun couple” by going as something hilarious.  This costume manages to check off exactly zero boxes on that list.  Apart from being, well, boring (it’s a fucking plug and socket) and not effective as a Halloween costume (the point of Halloween is to dress up as something fun.  Who finds a plug and socket fun?) it’s also trying to make three jokes, all of them are bad, two of them you probably missed, and one of them you missed but will hate us for pointing it out for you.

Okay, ready for the three jokes?  You’ve been warned.  Also, we use the term “jokes” here in about as loose of terms as possible.

“Joke” #1:  The plug is his dick, heh heh.  He’s going to plug his dick into her socket.  Her socket is her vagina.  Heh.  Heh.

(That’s the joke you got)

“Joke” #2:  She’s got him on a LEASH!  She’s got him wrapped BY THE CORD!  Insert additional pseudo-misogynistic statement making fun of men who help out their significant others when asked nicely!  BAM!

(That’s the one you might of missed, but is inconsequential)

“Joke” #3:  He can also sex up her boobies, because there is a socket on her boobies too.

(that’s the one you’re mad at us for pointing out)

Spoiler alert: the couple wearing this tandem costume is the absolute fucking worst.

This one is a little subtle, so we’ll forgive you if you didn’t get it right away.  You see, he’s dressed as a snake charmer.  But the snake, and again, this is extremely subtle, the snake is coming out of his pants.  Now, there’s a phrase that some people use to describe, well, the male penis.  It is “trouser snake.”  This isn’t a common term, but it is a thing that people say.  Again, this is very subtle.  But, and if we’re interpreting this costume wrong, feel free to correct us in the comments, because it’s very nuanced, but if we had to guess, we’d say that this “snake charmer” is “charming” his trouser snake.  So the snake coming out of his pants is supposed to be his penis!  Ha!  Hahahah!  Oh we just got it now, this costume is hilarious, and whoever buys it is super smart and super funny, and the look on the model’s face in this picture is in no way far more sinister than it has any right to be!

Ha ha ha!  Trouser snake!  Classic!

There are a lot, and we mean a lot, of costumes that involve “tricking people” into touching your dick.  We use quotation marks because these costumes have tricked, in the history of their existence as a genre of costume, exactly zero people into touching anyone’s dick.  We’d like to think that the guys that buy these kinds of costumes think they’re saying, “Ha ha!  I am fun, but also sexual?” while at least being fully aware that no one will actually be like “Ha ha!  A petting zoo!  Eeeek, I touched it, ha ha, oh I’m bad!”  Which is good.  If you’re spending $80 bucks to put on a costume for the express purpose of getting a stranger to touch a thick layer of felt in the vicinity of your genitals in a crowded place, you might be a psychopath.  However, the understanding of the people buying this costume stops there, because they fail to realize that everyone seeing this costume finds themselves thinking either, “Ugh, gross” or maybe, “Seriously?  How old are you” or definitely, “I’m not leaving my drink unattended at this party, I guess then.”

Seriously, who decided that 50% of all Halloween costumes had to be dicks?  You could open a Halloween costume shop called “Halloween Your Dick” and have it just be costumes that have random phallic objects jutting out of pairs of pants in a phallic manner, and you’d be able to fill a goddamn warehouse without finding duplicate costumes.  What is up with Halloween’s obsession with dicks?

Oh, Goddamn it.

Category #2:  Lame Bad Puns

Better than the previous section, because you’re not desperately trying to focus all attention into the room to your dick like some deranged poorly-reformed flasher, but worse than the previous section because they’re buying costumes of lame puns, are the people who buy costumes because of lame puns.  You’ll know the person who starts making dad jokes about 20 years before biology dictates he needs to by spotting the people in their 20’s and 30’s that actually buy these costumes.

A pun costume, when done well, makes people groan when they see them.  When done poorly, they make people go up to the person, say, “What are you,” and then punch the costume wearer right in the where-they-suspect-the-dick-is (damn, if only this costume managed to point out, very emphatically, where the groin is!) for wasting their goddamn time when they go, “Heh, I’m Bigfoot.  GET IT!?  BIG!?  FOOT!?!?!?!?”

“DO YOU GET IT GUYS!?  HUH!?  HAAAAA HAHAHAHA!  GET IT!!!!?? BIG!!!! FOOT!!!! AHHHH HAHAHAHA Ouch, goddamn it, why did you punch me in the left thigh!?”

Damn, so close.

If you can’t read that, it says, “Keep off the grass.”  He is dressed as a potted marijuana plant.  No amount of reward would justify us expending any more effort in explaining why this is lame and bad.

This costume is like a how-to guide for being a douchebag.  If you can’t make out what the tag is, it says “To: Women, From: God.”  It’s God’s gift to women.  Here’s a few things about this.  First of all, anyone who says, “I’m God’s gift to women” is an asshole.  There’s really no way for someone to be like, “I’m God’s gift to women!  Ha ha, get it?  But seriously, I’m actually very down to earth and humble.”  No, the guy who says, “I’m God’s gift to women” is the kind of person who tries really hard to get laid, and when he actually succeeds, tries to position himself in front of a mirror so he can stare at his reflection right in the eyes and finish in ten seconds.  That’s the kind of guy who goes around saying, “I’m God’s gift to women.”

Apart from the dickweed vibe the costume emits, it also manages to be one of the more awkward looking costumes out there.  Is there anything more cumbersome than spending a whole night in a box that uses up all of your torso?  You will bump the drinks out of no fewer than 8 people’s hands, mumbling apologetically, with a big ass “God’s gift to women” gag on your chest, looking like the jackass you are.

In case you couldn’t tell, we really hate this costume.  We should also take this moment to point out that the model in this picture looks a little too much like Norman Bates for us to feel comfortable in his presence (heh, more like his PRESENTS, right?  God, we hate ourselves).  We’re not saying that his mummified dead mother is sitting in a rocking chair somewhere in his house, we’re just saying that we’d be more surprised if it turned out that he’s actually a well-rounded adjusted adult in real life, is all.

He’s good in the sack.  That is the joke.  Fuck this entire category right in the face.

Category #3:  You Think You’re Being Funny But You’re Actually Just Racist

Let’s take a moment to pause briefly and talk about a very important subject—the “male models who are photographed wearing novelty costumes for sale” demographic.  We scoured through half a dozen different novelty costume sites while researching this article, and we found exactly zero costumes modeled by someone who wasn’t a six-foot tall white guy named Connor McCoy who got a lacrosse scholarship at Birmingham before his bros at Sig Ep told him he should “totally go into modeling, bro, no homo.”

They took their dream to Los Angeles, to be a “model and, maybe an actor?  Actors get chicks all the time, right?  Jennifer Lawrence, like, only dates actors, you know bro?”  After getting cast in a few infomercials as “stereotypical white guy who doesn’t know how a sink works” they caught the eye of costumesforless.com or whateverthefuck.  And they proceeded to put on whatever horrendous costume they were told to for fifty bucks a pop, and they just shrugged and went with it, since it was at least slightly less demeaning than gay porn.

Anyway, that brings us to the part of the article where we have to point out that white people should really stop dressing up as non-white people for their costumes.  There are so many costumes out there, just realize your limitations.  If you’re a fat dude, you can’t dress up as Ed Norton from Fight Club, sorry.  You have thousands of hilarious fat people costumes to choose from, so pick from that.  Similarly, if you’re a skinny dude, don’t dress up as Fat Albert.  And also, if both of the hypothetical people are white, do not dress up as Fat Albert.

It’s pretty simple, really.  Your costume is better if you look like who you’re supposed to be, anyway.  Which is why the following costumes are totally racist, not only because Connor McCoy is modeling them before he has to star in Man Poon 7- The Stretchening in order to pay his rent, it’s because we can pretty much guarantee that everyone who buys the following costume is a white bro who thinks he’s being totally hilarious.  He’s not.  He’s being racist.  Stop it.

This costume confuses the shit out of us.  We honestly are not sure how to deal with it.  This costume would only make sense if you took a racist from the 1970’s, put him in a time machine to present day, gave him a moderate-to-severe head injury, and then asked him to describe the show Starsky and Hutch to a bunch of wide-eyed sweatshop workers who don’t speak English.  This is a pimp costume, by the way.  We felt like we had to point that out, just in case you were wondering if maybe there was some leopard-cane-wielding villain in Superman V or something.  To answer that question, there’s not.  There’s…

We mean, look at the hat and…

Let’s just move on, shall we?

Dear White People,

We know you’re probably all worked up and excited from Cinco de Mayo six months ago, but we feel we have to remind you, yet again, that you cannot put on a sombrero, grab some tequila, and go around shouting “Arriba!” all fucking night without someone calling you a racist, or at least thinking it really loudly.  You’re really just one frat party away from being a Huffington Post article about that one white fraternity that’s being censured by their University for having a “Mexican-American War” themed costume party where everyone decided to dress as Mexicans.  Just, don’t do it.  Dress as a Ghostbuster or something.  Everyone likes the Ghostbusters.

If this came with a working ukulele, it’d be almost worth the $50 bucks to keep the instrument, and burn the rest.  But it’s not.  This $50 costume lets you pretend to be an “island girl” which is a term that was last used without causing the room to go awkwardly silence as a few people clear their throats to excuse themselves in about 1963.  It’s is called the “Wanna Nookie” because if you’re a white guy who actually wants to buy this costume, you’re long past the point where you’re phased by blatant racism.  And if you’re a minority who actually wanted to buy this, you would only exist as a hypothetical in the mind of the white person who spent all of Halloween justifying his costume decision by telling his friends, “No, come on guys, it’s like, super funny man.”

It was once totally culturally acceptable for white people to dress up as Native Americans.  Like, for a long time.  No one really conflated the “white people sorta wiped out Indians” thing with people putting on a headdress and dancing around as a school’s mascot or whatever because we lived in a society where we put lead in our paint and gave our children toys that could kill them.  So yeah, dress as a Native American, put some paint on your face, run around doing that whooping thing where you just put your hand over your mouth and take it off over and over to go “woo-oo-oo-oo-oo” as your war cry, whatever, daddy’s got to smoke a pack of smooth Winston cigarettes while sleeping in a separate bedroom from your mother in this loveless sham of a marriage.

But we’re here to say, officially, that the time of white people dressing as Indians has come and gone.  Sorry, white people, but you had a good run, you should take comfort in that.

So remember, America.  This Halloween, get good and drunk, and don’t dress as any of the above costumes.  Maybe dress as something topical that makes people say, “Oh, God, you have a hazmat suit and a Cowboys jersey, you’re an Ebola patient, too soon, man, too soon, oh God how drunk are you, you just fell into my coffee table.”  Because that’s what Halloween is really about.