Back at college, I remember walking up to my friend Mike’s house on Halloween and seeing him frantically painting bright, red briefs onto a pair of nice blue jeans. He was really going at it, too — slapping the wet brush all over the crotch and pockets, wagging his tongue out like a dog.
Of course, an hour later he showed up to the party as Superman. And though he didn’t leap any tall buildings in a single bound he did manage to drink most of the punch bowl faster than a speeding bullet.
More importantly, his last minute Halloween costume got us all laughing. Some of the best ones do that:
• Professional baseball player. This is where you dig through your closet and peel out that old sweat-smelling jersey and orange foam hat from little league. Throw on your baseball glove and paint some thick black lines under your eyes and you’re good to go.
• Sandwich. My friend Brian once slapped a piece of bread on his chest and another on his back and went as a sandwich. You’ve heard of a quarter pounder, right? Well this was a two-hundred pounder.
• Vending Machine. Here’s where you duct tape little bags of chips and chocolate bars all over your body. If your party’s working properly, they’ll be ripped off you within ten minutes of getting there.
• The random closet mish-mash with a funny name. You’ve got a purple tie, dark shades, and leather pants so you go as a Club-Going Comedian With A Black Eye. You’ve got a bridesmaid dress, oven mitts, and a tiara, so you go as Lounge Singer Baking Cookies For A Bachelorette Party. You get the idea.
• Jabba The Hutt. Time to laze around on the couch in a green sleeping bag.
• A Road. Simply rip off a long strip of masking tape and stick it up your stomach and down your back. For bonus points, add a couple dinky cars to your shirt. Watch out for speed bump jokes.
• A Terrible Record Collection. My friend Alec once bought a milk crate of old records for a quarter from a garage sale. They were in horrible condition, but the price was right so he took them home. For Halloween he safety-pinned most of them on himself and went as A Terrible Record Collection. It was a good laugh, but since he couldn’t really move he ending up spending most of the party whisper-singing Monster Mash to himself on a futon.
• Grapes. Boy, if you’ve got some purple or green balloons laying around, have we got a costume for you.
• Yourself. This is where you arrive at the party completely unprepared, but rather than fess up you just tell people you’re going as yourself this year. Then whenever someone says “But that’s not a costume,” you say “Maybe it is…” and give them a really exaggerated wink.
• Stuff From My trunk. Okay, back to Superman Mike. Last year he wore an enormous tarp around his neck like a cape and wrapped himself in twine and booster cables. People, keep in mind this is the same guy who once strung a bunch of pots and pans over his shoulders and went as Pots and Pans.
Okay listen, when somebody puts an amazing amount of time and effort into a kick-ass costume, that’s worth celebrating. Nobody here denies that. All we’re saying today is if you manage to scramble around your house at the last minute and get us all laughing with your hilariously creative costume then that’s complete admirable.
It’s simply commendable.
It’s downright respectable.
And we all know it’s just totally
AWESOME!
I had a manager one time who wore his regular clothes to work on Halloween when we were all dressing up. Anytime anyone asked him whole he was supposed to be, he said, “A serial killer…they look just like everyone else.”
ZING.
Well done- he was probably the scariest one there.
I think he probably meant ‘homocidal maniac’ like in The Adams Family. Wednesday is amazing!
Here’s one up:
It’s time for your laziness to pay off. As you have conveniently forgotten to take out the recycling for the past three Monday’s in a row, the time has come when you can finally seek justification for your laziness. Safely fasten your scuba mask and dive into that overflowing blue box of cardboard waste of yours, piled to the brim with used toilet paper rolls, rinsed-out yogurt containers and 5-year-old milk cartons far past their expiration date recently discovered behind the leftovers in your fridge.
Rummage through the contents of your recycling bin for those three or four empty cereal boxes, still in tact, excluding the Family-sized cheerios box that has been ripped to “Shreddies” in order to salvage the free movie ticket coupon on the back of the box.
Once you have retrieved your gold doubloons and resurfaced for air, it is now time to put those countless nights of “take-in” to use. Cautiously cross over to the other side of your kitchen, approach the deceitful drawer that loves to slide out of place every time you pull it open and surprise yourself with your own strength when food is involved, and reach blindly into that drawer, past the individual packets of soya sauce, fortune-cookie crumbs, splinter-inducing chopsticks, leaking pouches of warm ketchup (because it just doesn’t taste the same when it hasn’t been found at the bottom of a brown paper Wendy’s bag, laying peacefully in a heated pool of excess fry-grease and burger-sweat), until you have spotted your target of flimsy butter knives, each nestled in their own personal bubbles of plastic-wrap.
Knives and boxes in tow, you are 2/3 on your way to the perfect “last-minute Halloween Costume”. It is time for “la piece de la resistance”, the glue that holds this party-popping, mouth-dropping, show-stopping disguise together. A little creative genius is needed for this final third as well. You will need a few pieces of red construction paper (note: if none is available, construction paper may be substituted for the notepad sitting by your telephone dyed with red sharpie). Think back to elementary school art class for creative inspiration and then go to town, cutting out big splotches of different shapes and sizes.
Finally, with all three parts complete, it is time to assemble to final product. Tape the red splotches onto the cereal boxes (once again, if budget-cuts have left your apartment “tapeless”, you may use the gum you are currently chewing as a binding system). Next, stab the blunted knives into the splotches until they puncture the cereal box barrier as well. Attach the pulverized boxes to a white apron that has been previously blood-stained from your previous thanksgiving turkey carving attempt, a few weeks earlier, and voila!
You have yourself a “Cereal Killer”
AWESOME!
Home-made costumes are always the best even if they are last minute and kind of lame. I have yet to master the skill of making a costume although I did go last night as a vampires mom. Put in some pointy teeth and I was set. :)
In college there was a girl at a party who wore a cute girl outfit underneath a man’s shirt. Her hair was messed up and she carried high heels in her hand. She was the walk of shame.
That is amazing. I may have to borrow that.
haha!! love it!!
I enjoyed the vending machine one. There’s probably a way to make that a profitable costume, too.
Going as yourself seems popular.
There is a guy I work with (mid 20’s) that came in today dressed as a college student. LOL….
He’s got on ripped blue jeans, gray hooded sweatshirt and a band T-shirt underneath. Hair looks like it hasn’t been brushed and some sneakers. I have never seen this man in anything other than a suit and tie. Nice change of pace. I love Halloween!!
Who is this Mike and on what address can I send his invitation to my Halloween party?
i had 3 possible options this year. get a dust mask and pretend i have swine flu, wear a sign on regular clothes that says “nudist on strike”, or get a long dark wig and carry around 8 baby dolls pretending to be octomom. still haven’t decided :)
This is your most awesome post ever. I am totally strapped for a costume for tomorrow, and now I’ve got a half dozen terrific ideas. Thank you! Seriously.
what’s also is awesome is when co-workers and bosses come to work in their halloween costumes!
Awesome post! Back in the 90’s, I once dressed up as Tonya Harding. It was pretty easy to piece together a passable skating outfit, sling skates over my shoulder and grab the tire iron out of the garage. Note: tire irons are really really heavy.
Another year, my daughter dressed as a bat. My husband looked at her completely black costume and quipped: “What are you, the invisible pedestrian?” After that she was a bat with a lot of reflective tape markings.
Now remember, kids, to review the guidelines of #960: Stategic Trick-or-treating
That’s some good advice.
Just staple a balloon to your shirt, and go as Balloon Boy? Be careful though – if its a green or purple balloon, everyone will think that you’re a really picked-over bunch of grapes.
There’s always the last-minute costumes Adam Sandler came up with on SNL, like “Crazy Pickle Arm,” or “Crazy Backwards Guy,” and “Crazy Pickle Mustache.”
I read on MLIA that you could wear your normal clothes and be a Nudist on Strike.
You could always dress as a Charlie Brown Ghost aka bedsheet, cut two eye holes, make dozens of black dots all over the bedsheet. Presto!
At Halloween last year, my classmate slung a clothes iron around his neck and said he was Iron Man.
Then this year, I was confused when I saw the word ‘book’ written across his face. But then I found out he was Facebook. How AWESOME is he?!
Not TOO awesome since he just borrowed the “Facebook” costume from Jim on the Office.
Jabba looks more like a slug in this photo!
I was considering going out as a Nudist for Halloween!
Y not…? Saves money on costume!
Pretty sure I was at least a couple of these as a kid. Not that it mattered, my mom always made me wear my winter coat over the costume anyway…
that’s exactly what happens in michigan. halloween isnt halloween without trudging through snowpiles and that douche neighbor’s unshoveled sidewalk or returning home with frostbite
we went to a halloween party last night and there was a guy dressed as “Ghetto Prime” – his version of Optimus Primo from Transformers. He had on the Optimus mask and his body was inside a box that he had painted black and he had hubcaps all over the box.
I remember dressing up as a train engine when I was a little kid. It’s a long story, but I’m still alright with it. Last year I dressed up as a man being eaten by a giraffe. Needless to say, it was painful. And a couple years back I had to work at a gas station on halloween so I dressed up as a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. All in all, the experiences were, well, awesome.
Great post! This was definitely Tony and I last night before his work Halloween party. We pulled together two costumes in less than an hour. We were recycling containers – I was paper and cardboard and he was plastics and aluminum. It was kind of a hit and we got lots of points for creativity.
last night i wore a pair of devil horns and made a shirt that simply said bastard. i was a horny bastard.
OR
get a regular potato and attach it to the front of your pants. you are now a dictator
I prefer to put on casual dark coloured clothes, go to the nearby gumball machine and get myself a pair of fake vampire teeth dentures and i’m good. XD
Just put on lighter tone foundation and everything is great. XD
Halloween night: group of 11-year old boys at my door:
Kids: Trick-or-Treat!
Me (handing out candy): Here you go.
Me (to Kid that appears not to be in costume): What are you?
Kid, aggressively: I’m a guy with a gun! (shoves water pistol in my face)
Kid2: Ya, this is a robbery!
Me: Yeah, that costume is more like a robbery of the Spirit of Halloween!
Kid, sheepishly: Ya, I know, it’s pretty lame.
This is hilarious! I mean, I already LOL’ed at your comment above about how you made your daughter go as “a bat with a lot of reflective tape markings” (I read this to my wife, who chimed in with her usual line of: “Safety First!”), but this is too much.
Your response was perfect, but I love that the kid admitted it. It’s like it slightly redeemed the fact that he is probably a little snot.
Admitting you are a douchebag is the first step towards recovery, I always say.
Or he’s one of those kids whose parents don’t care if he has a costume or not. cut the kid some slack
I’m going as a vending machine next year, lol.
A guy could wear nothing but a pair of roller skates and go as a pull toy…
A friend’s husband turned up at our Halloween party wearing a T-shirt that read “Go Ceilings!!” …
no one got it … finally he had to tell us what he was supposed to be … (drumroll) … a ceiling fan (for realz).
The more I read it, the more it impresses me. I don’t know how I ever worked without hilarious and funny things in our life, Life would be so much easier especially when there’s a jokes here and there. Being funny is nice because a lot of serious people are lacking with this kind of behavior that is why they are much look older. I would like to thank you for your outstanding blog post. Keep it up! Awesome!
This wasn’t a last minute one, but I went as a theatre floor one year. I hot glued a movie-theatre drink cup to the front of an old sweater with a big hot glue ‘spill’ coming out of it, then I hot glued popcorn and random candies(smarties etc) over the rest of myself.
I dressed up in a slutty dress and called myself the girl that you dont take home to momma.
Once I had a sign that said Go Ceilings! And went as a ceiling fan.
One year, my boyfriend did the Sum Is Greater Than Its Parts costume by just putting on random costume-ish items he had: gigantic afro wig we got at the grocery store for 99 cents, Groucho Marx glasses with moustache, and obnoxious Hawaiian shirt. He did tell one person that he was Gene Shalit, even though that was not his original intention.
Another year, he did the classic ghost costume, but it was a lot more work than he thought it would be. After we bought a white sheet (do you know how expensive those are, even at Target?), we went to the ladies’ sock section to buy some sheerish black socks/tights. We draped the sheet over him, marked where his eyes were, cut out big holes, and glued scraps from the tights so that he had dark eye holes but he could still see.
One year my boss cut up the bottom of his tie and wore a box with holes cut out of the side for his arms. He said he was being eaten by the shredder. Funny, but then he discovered that he couldn’t sit down with the box on, so he his costume was reduced to a shredded tie.
Candy corn: white shorts, yellow shirt over top of an orange shirt and folded up to reveal some orange. Instant candy corn!
I won a costume contest with this costume.
Nudist on strike, all me.
With 5 mins to go before a vampire-themed party, I used a red felt pen to daub blood on a white t-shirt, then mounted a piece of wood on the outside by nailing it to a cardboard base on the inside. Instant vampire, freshly staked!
And on another last-minute occasion I dressed all in black, and wore a black cardboard box on my head with three coloured circles on the front: Traffic lights.
What’s really awesome about this post (except all the nice ideas) is that the picture of a terible record is a slovenian record. Since there’s only two milion of us in our conutry and even less around the world, it was quite a surprise. it really made me laugh:D oh and from the looks of it, the record really has to be terrible
Yes! I’m croatian so I could read it too hehe.. and yes it does look pretty awful… haha.
Friend of mine dressed up in pink and wore a shoe on her head. “Gum under your shoe”.
I on the otherhand, wore a polo tshirt, shorts, tennis shoes, head band and wristbands, slapped a USA on my shirt and carried around ping pong mallets. I was a champion.
I put my son in black sweatpants and black hoodie, pinned a strip of white material from beginning of middle seam in the hood all the way down his back. Glue cotton balls down the strip, a little facepaint and its a Skunk!
The old record with foreign name means : Happy New Summer or Luckier New Summer…so cool
BTW….Awesome Blog
no, it actually means “happy new year” :)
Lots of good ideas here! There is a retail chain in New York called Ricky’s NYC that has a ton of fun costume ideas, including some you discussed here. You can check it out online at http://www.rickyshalloween com or http://www.rickysnyc com
Hey nice design on the website really good
I wish I can dance very nice. Thanks for all the information. bellydance costumes
I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoyed every little bit of it. I have you bookmarked your site to check out the latest stuff you post.
My mom’s stretch pants, a white dress shirt (tied at the bottom), black dress shoes, and a thick head band. Silicone keyboard wrist rest shoved in the stretch pants optional!
People would as me what I was all night and I would loudly proclaim, “I AM MICHAEL FLATLEY, LOOORD OF THE DANCE!” Then break out into a jig.
liked this post!
A co-worker made a bed-post contraption that made her look like she was lying in bed with the covers pulled up to her neck. It was awesome.
But the best was the guy at one party I went to, who was dressed all in white with a little black mask. It wasn’t until you got really close to him that you heard, very faint and tinny, the William Tell Overture. It was creepalicious.
I once visited some friends out of town and ended up going to a Halloween party. Some of us were dressed up. Some of us were not. I was not.
There was plenty of alcohol, and despite my lack of a costume, I entered the costume contest at the urging of my friends.
The participants lined up, and they passed a microphone to each of us and everyone would get some attention, say what their costume was if it wasn’t clear, and otherwise try to win.
When it came to be my turn, I said “I’m a vampire.” I was just a regular-looking guy in jeans and a T-shirt and some plastic vampire fangs somebody gave me. The other participants gave me blank looks, but since I didn’t know them at all, it didn’t matter what they thought. I bared my plastic fangs in a snarl, and my friends started cracking up.
My friend and I were in Vegas last halloween and we were totally broke so we made ourselves into Slot Machines. We had a silver survival blanket that we cup and and made skirts and tops out of and stuck cherry, bar and 7 cards to our chests. We had glitter all over us and visors on too. It was seriously the best halloween ever!
The Transformer is seriously the best costume ever- click on “worth celebrating”. :-D
I usually put a lot of effort into costumes like this. I sort of do a random closet mish-mash where each piece is carefully picked solely because it goes with nothing else I’m wearing. Throw on my plastic sword and I’m good to go!
I usually put a lot of effort into costumes like this. I sort of do a random closet mish-mash where each piece is carefully picked solely because it goes with nothing else I’m wearing. Throw on my plastic sword and I’m good to go! Yay!
Okay so here is my favourite.
You place a potatoe on the end of your penis and go as a dicktater