Snuggies a strange joke from the Internet generation

I’m afraid I don’t get the Snuggie.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about,… I’m afraid I don’t get the Snuggie.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll explain. A Snuggie is a blanket with sleeves.

That’s it, actually. That’s all you need to know about Snuggies.

Well, sort of. Because, the weird thing about Snuggies isn’t so much that they’re a ridiculously silly product, but that, somehow, without any rational explanation, they are popular.

Last week I was watching ‘Late Night With Jimmy Fallon’ — I like The Roots, don’t judge me — and Fallon did a segment with the audience called ‘Shared Experiences’ where they would all do something ridiculous together, and one of the things they did was all wear Snuggies. Even Tracy Morgan came out and did his interview in a Snuggie.

This, in itself, is not that strange. Late-night talk show hosts do stupid things all the time, like David Letterman reading off the same freaking top-10 list every night or Jay Leno thinking that he’s funny.

But what I wasn’t prepared for was for this to become some sort of actual trend. I read a column in The New York Times where a guy went around the city wearing one, and soon after other newspapers began printing similar pieces. And while I was writing this column, I found a story about a 200-plus-person Snuggie pub crawl in San Francisco.

Let me repeat that, just for good measure. More than 200 people went out and wandered around San Francisco in blankets. With sleeves.

A good bit of the Snuggie’s appeal can be chalked up to its almost sublimely ridiculous advertising campaign, which features a variety of people struggling with the fact that their plain old blanket doesn’t let them use their arms and that this is the most exasperating thing ever. Because, you know, pulling your arm out from under a blanket is a problem that has been on the minds of Americans for decades.

The commercial also shows people happily engaged in using their Snuggies, wearing them while talking on the phone, holding a baby or roasting marshmallows — things that are obviously impossible to do while wearing a regular blanket, or maybe a sweater or something.

But somehow, this product — which is, in pretty much every respect, almost unbelievably stupid — became a huge fad. Suddenly news networks are covering it, celebrities are wearing them for publicity stunts and the company that sells Snuggies, Allstar Products Group of Hawthorne, N.Y., has so far sold more than 4 million of the sleeved blankets.

Normally I’m the sort of guy who is more than happy to just chalk this sort of thing up to people being easily led into stupid fads — does anyone recall the pet rock? — and call it a day. But I feel like there’s a slightly different sort of mechanic operating here. People aren’t wearing Snuggies because they think they’re cool, because it’s immediately obvious that they aren’t. They’re blankets with sleeves, for God’s sake. They make choir robes look fashionable.

No, what’s going on here is that the people buying Snuggies are engaging in some sort of amazing parody act by actually living out the absurd imagery from the Snuggie infomercial. And what’s incredible about this is that it’s unconscious: Nobody is watching the Snuggie commercial and saying, ‘Hey, that looks like a useful and innovative product that I could really use to slash my heating bills and keep warm at sporting events!’ What they’re saying is, ‘My God, that is the silliest thing ever. This product deserves nothing but ridicule and scorn.’

The only thing is, the way our generation tends to ridicule things is by popularizing them to the point where they’re indistinguishable from a real fad. Look at Rickrolling as an example. ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ is, by all accounts, a terrible song with an even worse music video. But dubiously redirecting people to it on YouTube became the height of Internet comedy, and then the mainstream media just turned the whole thing into one big fracas, and somehow in the middle of that, the song actually became popular again. I heard it on the radio a few months ago (and instantly thought that anyone listening to that station had been Rickrolled, which I guess shows how cool I am).

Examples of this abound. The ShamWow guy, lolcats, All Your Base — these are all memes that somehow became appropriated by popular culture and took on a life of their own. The only thing is that the Snuggie is an actual commercial venture, and to make fun of it properly you actually have to wear it, apparently in a pub crawl with hundreds of other similarly minded (read: drunk) enthusiasts.

So, what to make of the Snuggie? Undoubtedly, its popularity will burn out in a few months or so, and then 4 million people will be stuck with a stupid sleeved blanket. But at least we can rest assured that the vast majority of those people weren’t buying it because they thought it was a good idea, but rather to make fun of it. And if you actually own a Snuggie, thanks for making it impossible to tell actual fads apart from elaborate and silly practical jokes.

E-mail Richard at rab53@pitt.edu