Halloween is quickly approaching this year and instead of recommending costume ideas, I’ve prepared a short list on what costumes to stay away from.
1. Something Racist
As a nation, we are the least racist we’ve ever been. However, this means that we are now more outraged by anything close to resembling racism than we’ve ever been. Public figures lose everything they’ve worked their entire lives for after saying a few things the wrong way on Twitter. A lot of them probably deserve it, but some of them simply said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Dressing up as a racial stereotype will only lead to a confrontation somewhere down the line. Unless you’re a white guy partying with strictly white supremacists it’s not going to work, and even white supremacists don’t want to party with white supremacists.
2. Any Costume Where a Dude Has His Shirt Off
Halloween as an adult is for three things and all you have to do is remember the three Cs: Costumes, cocktails, and cleavage. However, it never fails every year when you’re out at a party or bar and you see the guy not wearing a shirt just to show off how much time he spends at the gym. It could be a guy dressed up as Adam from Adam and Eve only displaying leaves around his groin, or a douche dressing up as a douche like that douche on TV. The point is that these guys lack the sense of humor or brain power to come up with something clever, so they try to make up for it by showing their finely tuned physique. Halloween is for the ladies to look good, not the Bros.
3. Girls Who are Nurses in Real Life Who Dress Up as Nurses
You see this way more often than you should. This is unoriginality and laziness at its finest. This isn’t someone who is a nurse dressing up a slutty nurse for Halloween. This is someone that works as a nurse and then just wears what they wore to work as a nurse out on Halloween night as a costume. That’s like having a job as a janitor, and when someone invites you over to their party you show up with a mop and bucket to clean their floors.
4. Referee
It’s been done to death and there’s never anything to differentiate one referee costume from another. There are plenty of repeat costumes out there that you see every year, but if you’re something like a pirate, at least you’ve got a lot of variables on your clothing to switch around. Referees are limited to only black and white stripes. The only exception is slutty referee, but putting slutty before anything pretty much warrants any kind of pass on a costume
5. Ray Rice or Ray Rice’s Girlfriend
It may seem like a clever idea to get two guys to dress up as elevator doors and have them part ways at random intervals during the night to reveal someone dressed up as Ray Rice dragging a lifeless body out. This is a bad idea. At some point you’re going to come across someone at a party who is or knows someone who was the victim of abuse. You see, the idea of abuse is funny to you because you can’t imagine ever doing that to a woman, but the truth is there are a bunch of shitheads out there that hit women. You don’t want to dress up as a pile of shit do you? Actually that would work. Put a Ray Rice jersey on and then smear a pile of shit on your head. When people ask, “What are you?” You can respond with “I’m that shithead Ray Rice.”
P.S. If you’ve already crafted the elevator doors call an audible and go with a Willy Wonka elevator. That’s the last time anything good happened on an elevator.