1. Do you want a Snuggie?
a. I already have two, and the free booklight. My Weimaraner wears the
second and I use the booklight to retouch my makeup in the car when it’s
dark.
b. A TV screen is closer than I like to be to those things. When the ads
come on I scream and hide under the coffee table.
c. Who are you? Why are you asking? Are they paying you?
(CHECK ONE)
2. Why do the people who do not own Snuggies get so hung up over the
blankets’ success?
a. Jealousy: I, too, could have been rich.
b. Jealousy: I, too, could own a Snuggie if I hadn’t committed myself to
hating them.
(CHECK ONE)
3. Assuming an average per-household purchase of two Snuggies (since the TV
ad deal is best: $19.99 for two, plus free booklight), and allowing for the
occasional family groups that live in large renovated farmhouses and who buy
the blanket with sleeves in bulk because they wear nothing else, why have
over one and a half million American households purchased one or more
Snuggies?
a. Many Americans were not hugged enough by their parents; they use Snuggies as a substitute for parental affection.
b. The ads use illegally flashed images between frames, showing strip teases
involving Snuggies (male and female), the guillotining, lynching, or public
derision of non-Snuggie-wearers by crowds in black Snuggies, and other
scenes. Between-frame flashes are tailored to viewing areas based on complex
demographical research: In New Haven, the crowd points and falls over
laughing at a non-Snuggie reading aloud from a long manuscript; in
Pittsburgh, a team of football players in black short-sleeved Snuggies with
yellow lettering stop and stare in disgust at a non-Snuggied receiver who
butterfingers an easy, game-deciding pass; and in Los Angeles, a minor
actress shows up to the Oscars in a fitted white tuxedo, only to find the
fashion has moved on to cutaway Snuggies, with layered, bellybutton-length
gold chains, pendants, and necklaces.
c. The ads can be used as drinking games. The drinking games are more fun if
everyone is wearing Snuggies.
d. Everything is more fun when you’re high.
e. There comes a time when disparate market forces combine into a sweeping
trend that changes all aspects of American experience—a tipping point: It is
winter. Obama won the election. There’s an economic crisis on. Heat costs
more than Snuggies. The ads are on YouTube. YouTube is a cheap form of
entertainment. The inauguration (where red and blue Snuggies, equally cheap,
were sighted) has picked up Snuggies and propelled them to popularity.
f. The revolution has been building; the people were bound to rise against
their oppressors eventually. Proletariats of the world, unite!
g. Thomas Merton received public acclaim for his unbridled desire to become
a Trappist monk (vows: not just poverty and chastity, but silence). His
autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, swept the country because, though
we won’t admit it, Americans all have a deeply repressed desire to be monks
and nuns, to wear habits, and to live in cloisters. Buying a Snuggie is
easier than unrepressing yourself; also, it doesn’t involve moving. Or
obeying an abbot.
h. We don’t want monastic life; we want small, portable cults, connected to
a parent cult through televised messages. If picking a color for your
domestic group is not individualized enough, light colors can be purchased
and tie-dyed.
i. Modern life works steadily against the natural biological rhythms of
human bodies. Evolutionary progress is hampered in technologized countries
because natural selection is severely reduced, and the maladapted don’t die
off as well; even if evolutionary progress weren’t hampered,
industrialization changes human life too quickly for natural selection to
keep up. The case in question illustrates the point: our bodies are
programmed to warm and cool in circadian rhythms, reaching lowest
temperatures when it was, before electricity, most advantageous to be asleep
inside a well-protected enclosure, since being out and about was likely to
get you eaten by a nocturnal predator. Thus, humans staying up late at night
to read great literature are evolutionarily disadvantaged: As their bodies
cool, they are likely to feel chilled. The Snuggie not only counteracts
circadian cooling, but, in its enveloping, also meets the primal need for
nighttime protection.
j. Look, you’re making this all too complicated. They’re warm. When you get
up for more beer you don’t have to leave your blanket. When you sit down you
don’t have to cover yourself back up.
k. Americans who don’t like horror movies wish they liked horror movies, and
sense deeply an internal failure: how much of a coward is a person who can’t
separate reality and filmic image enough to see the humor in zombies?
Snuggies are creepy, but on TV they’re always in lit rooms, no one gets
stabbed (except, in Detroit, in the flashes between frames), and the ads are
short. For the chickenhearted, Snuggie ads provide precisely that mix of
squeamy spine-chill and personal distance/safety (I, after all, am not
wearing a Snuggie, and my husband is all the way across the couch).
(CHECK ONE)
[first published by McSweeney’s online]