Humpday Hate: Dearly Beloved, You Are *Such* Assholes.

It is not odd or foreign to be able to appreciate the beauty in sad things—the carcass of a rose bathed in moonlight on the pavement.  A final goodbye between old lovers.  The ever-present hunger of homelessness.

Wait, what?

It must be pretty cool to be rich, removed, and privileged enough to theme your wedding after something that was actually really effing terrible.  Isn’t that right, couple who had recently had a “Depression-era hobo” ceremony?

Seriously, wtf is wrong with people?  When is the first Auschwitz themed wedding?  Did we miss that one yet?  How’d that go?  Bride & groom arrive by railcar?  Guests forcibly separated and numbered at the entrance?  Emaciated wait staff?  Nuptials in a replica gas chamber?  Orphan tear cocktails?  OH, THAT’S JUST DARLING.

Like, I kind of know what you were going for here (I think?), but come on.  At least try to not be an asshole.  Call it something else.  Call it a 1930s rustic country wedding or something.  Depression hobo?!  Way to trivialize.  Hobos weren’t just caricatures; they were actual people with actual lives and LOTS of problems thanks to one of the toughest economic times in American history.  That dude on your cute little party favor?  He had a name.  Maybe it was Steve.  Why not have a Steve-themed wedding, with complimentary copies of Main Street, because Steve loved Sinclaire Lewis.  He fucking loved him.

"I HAVE A FAMILY, MOTHERFUCKER"

And I’ll tell you what else.  If you ARE going to insist on and commit to being a pretentious jerk and having a “Depression hobo” wedding, go all in.  Be accurate.  Mini flasks of “moonshine” (depression induced alcoholism!  How quaint!) and bindle sticks are just lazy.  There are other things you could have done to lend authenticity, like:

  • Require that your guests arrive starving, then make them stand in a bread line for hours at the reception.
  • During the ceremony, stage a crazy-as-balls dust storm in the parking lot outside.  Do not stop until your guests’ cars are covered.
  • Don’t invite any black people.  You know, because segregation was still a thing.  Actually, it looks like ya’ll had that part down.

Brokey McPoverty

Brokey McPoverty, aka Tracy Clayton, is a writer and humorist from Louisville, KY. She currently writes for BuzzFeed and lives in Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter.

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  • I don’t know. I might have enjoyed having my own colored only bathroom.

  • For more accuracy, how about refugee camp tents and Dorothea Lange style photographs? And everyone gets a copy of Grapes of Wrath.

  • Darkrose

    Then there’s the white South African couple who had the colonial African themed wedding.

  • Pingback: Weekly Feminist Reader()

  • Visitor

    God, this is atrocious. What’s especially sad to me is that some members of the wedding party and their friends look interesting, diverse, as if they would know something about different cultures because of their ancestry. But obviously, the purely white bread don’t have the market cornered on ignorance.

    Someone needed to put a basic American history text on the wedding registry.

  • Roxanne

    Did you miss this COLONIAL THEMED wedding?!?! Waaay worse than depression-hobo, though that’s not saying too much.

    http://jezebel.com/5820577/colonial+themed-wedding-included-authentic-all+black-servant-staff

  • So if I’m actually poor, would it be hip to have a billionaire-themed birthday party, or would it only be hip the other way around?

  • Steven Strauss

    I was approached to provide the music for this wedding. They wanted us to learn the songs from the soundtrack of “O Brother.” That movie was nearly as fun as this wedding.

  • The comments are interesting over on the ESTY site – the first 40 or so are really positive and sweet and then it just goes downhill from there. What saddens me is how these relatively young people are so ignorant of their history, so myopic in their thinking, so self-absorbed and so self-righteous (post wedding and post new asshole torn). Did they not have any friends or relatives who could have told them “perhaps this isn’t the best theme in light of the economic hardships a great deal of people in America (and around the world) are currently facing?”

    God I hate hipsters.