It occurred to me lately that I don’t have to go to “specialty novelty” stores anymore to get a good dose of off-color humor in my product selection. These days you can find such naughty what-nots at your neighborhood hipster variety store or tucked-away indie boutique.
Consumer trends in re appropriating retro pamphlet illustrations and Polaroids like someecards. or that guy who puts the ironic anti-Rockwellian captions on old family photos from the sixties and seventies have been spreading like wildfire. You can buy “Lip Shit” branded lip balm or a tin coin bank with a picture of a girl in 50’s pigtails saying she’s saving for therapy.
Or this stuff here:
So why are we pushing our boundaries so hard? I actually put it in the same bucket as the Internet meme, sketch comedy and adult cartoons: White Anglo Saxon Protestant children of Boomer and Swing generation parents are creating their own therapy through ironic consumerism that counters the “keeping up with the jones’es , “put on a happy face”, purposely-avoiding -the elephant-in-the-room that is our human condition “conditioning” they got growing up.
In our race to create a picture perfect middle class, previous generations somehow swallowed their emotions so hard they impacted themselves.
Now, however, consumer culture is literally letting lose the bowels of our potty humor and self deprication so we can reclaim our human touch.
That being said, you may want to use hand sanitizer if you are going to shake someone’s hand.
The Narcissistic (American) Anthropologist 