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A conversation with Christian Lander

Courtesy of CHRISTIAN LANDER
Christian Lander is responsible for the Web site stuffwhitepeoplelike.com and will be coming to UCLA today as a Campus Events Commission speaker.

By Daily Bruin Staff

Oct. 13, 2009 10:05 p.m.

He’s a blogger, he’s a best-selling author and he’s white. This last feature is particularly important when describing Christian Lander, a man who has made a living out of making fun of himself and consequently has made millions through his Web site stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. This 31-year-old writer is scheduled to speak on campus about how he found his success and why being white doesn’t merely refer to your skin color. Lander spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Saba Mohtasham about his personal whiteness, fruit picking and the future of “Stuff White People Like.”

Reaching out

Fifteen months after releasing his book, “Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions,” which spent a total of 22 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List and reached No. 11, Lander is taking his sarcastic comedy abroad. The book came out earlier this month in the U.K., but that’s not all: “It’s being translated into Japanese, so we’ll see how well that does.”

Though the blog and book seem like old news to some, Lander is working on turning his writings into a different medium: “We’re working on turning the blog and book into a TV show.” Contrary to popular belief, the show, which Lander said Fox is interested in taking on, wouldn’t consist of watching a white guy sit at his computer and make fun of white people: “It would be a single-cam comedy, and it’s the wrong kind of white guy learning how to be the right kind of white guy from a black guy. Hopefully it’ll work out.”

True to his words

Lander gets his fair share of flak for his blogs, which are oftentimes construed as insulting ““ post “#11 Asian Girls” has inspired at least 16,406 responses ““ but, above all, they are self-deprecating: “The big part of the success has been the accuracy and the truth behind it, so if I’m not making fun of myself it’s not going to resonate, so I really try to make fun of myself as mercilessly as possible.” He’s his own biggest target claiming his source of inspiration is, simply put, a “full-length mirror.” Lander is no stranger to the subject matter of his 129 blogs. Well … maybe not everything: “(I do) everything except for the outdoors stuff. I don’t do camping. Do I wear scarves? Yeah. When it’s cold enough. When it’s appropriate, I’ll wear scarves.”

Sneak peak

Evidence that Lander really does draw from his own life is the fact that his recent trip to an apple orchard will result in a future post: “I have an entry that I haven’t posted yet on fruit picking and basically white people don’t pay to pick fruit, they pay to be able to leave. That’s the difference. White people often pay for the experience of being a manual laborer, provided they don’t have to do it again.”

Living the (surprisingly long) dream

Lander never set out to make a profit with his blog, and despite the immense success it has achieved, he knows there’s always the possibility of having an end in sight: “It’s certainly lasted much, much longer than I ever expected it to. The goal from day one was always to make my friends laugh and as long it keeps making my friends laugh, it’ll keep going but once they stop laughing, I’ll just shut it down.” If it weren’t for the success of the blog, Lander is pretty sure he’d still be a copywriter in advertising. Does he miss it? “No. This is better.”

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