Question: Should you care about other people’s birthdays?
Verdict: No.
The Parody Shop Cynic Society and everyone’s favourite ventriloquist dummy Joe Blogs explain why you shouldn’t have to care about other people’s birthdays and how to act like you do, with minimum effort.
People are dummies.
The great escape: When you hear murmurs of ‘we’re doing the cake in a minute’ and ‘has everyone signed the card?’ – get outta there. Head for a loo break and take your time before slowly wandering back (i.e. arrive in time for cake).
The mime: As a ventriloquist’s dummy, miming comes as second-nature, but I have faith in your abilities to do the same. As you wander out of the toilet and towards the group of fake smilers –– faces lit by the glare of cheap candlelight –– keep your distance but crucially, be seen. Mime ‘Happy Birthday to you’ just as a few of the crowd and the birthday girl/boy acknowledge your arrival, raise your eyebrows as if to say ‘whoops! Must have missed the announcement!’ and see out the rest of the song by opening and closing your mouth. You can even make up new lyrics and whisper them to yourself, no one will know.
The email well-wish: ‘So sorry I couldn’t make your drinks, hope you had a good one x’ always works nicely. You didn’t say why, you didn’t say you had somewhere else to be, but they get it – they get you couldn’t be arsed to interact with human beings but felt the need to acknowledge the situation. Beautiful.
The Monday kitchen chat: don’t be a sell out and ask them if they had a good weekend, that’s boring. Let them do the talking, they were the ones arrogant enough to have a birthday, for Christ’s sake. Lead with a knowing look or a ‘still awake from Saturday?’ – if they’re half decent they’ll keep it snappy, if they respond with a 10 minute anecdote, treat it as an opportunity to daydream about much more interesting things. Like turning up at their party and starting a small fire.
Yes, always get them a card – then you have physical documentation proving you’ve made an effort and that you care. But get the right card. Here’s a few of The Parody Shop's collection – they’ll get the picture.
If you get a Facebook notification prompting you to wish someone a happy birthday, you could always build a little anticipation about your really exciting card and mention that you’ve got them something and that you’ll give it to them later. You could also send them some funny internet stuff, like this all-purposes birthday meme because people like memes don’t they? They can imagine a funny picture of their own, think of it like a meme voucher.
Yeah, memes are funny. Like dogs on waterslides with sunglasses on, they’re good as well aren’t they.
Some people research star signs to make sure their presents are suitable. As such, we’d suggest you find out what star sign the recipient is, read up about it – then completely disregard all of that information because it’s likely to be a pile of codsbollocks.
Obviously, the right thing to do is head over to www.theparodyshop.com or flick through our Insta feed. Inspiration will strike. How about some of these gems?
Send someone a glitter bomb:
Get them absolutely NOTHING in a nice package:
Are they single? Try a girlfriend or boyfriend pillow:
Potentially, but only a little bit and even if they do, what can they say? You went to the effort didn’t you?
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Meet Joe Blogs – face of The Parody Shop. But what is The Parody Shop and who is Joe Blogs? Why Joe? And what did he do before The Parody Shop?
