#david s. pumpkins

[scary-friend]

Happy David S. Pumpkins to all who celebrate 🎃

[gifsbysimplysonia]

[talkstothemoonandstars]

Seriously, how can you go through the Halloween season without David S. Pumpkins?

[putting-eddie-munson-in-places]

Can you put him with David S. Pumpkins?

any questions?

[seahorsepencils]

My toxic trait is that every time I watch Death in Heaven, when I get to the part when Kate asks the Doctor "any questions?" I immediately think of David S. Pumpkins. (And then for days it's all I can think about.)

[faline-cat444]

It's been found

[moonsprinquel]

From the vault: My Patr30n postcards doubled for Inktober! The theme this year was just my favorite spoopy characters!

➼ LIVESTREAM SUN + MON @ 5pm, WED @ 6pm (ET)

[quartercirclejab]

the vapid perfection of david s pumpkins

the halloween season is upon us, and prompted by a conversation i recently had about holiday characters, i come to you now on this tuesday night to bestow one of my half-clever pearls of wisdom:

the SNL character David S. Pumpkins is the perfect mascot for Halloween in the 21st century

for those of us unfamiliar, David S. Pumpkins is a character from a 2016 episode of Saturday Night Live, appearing in a Halloween sketch called "Haunted Elevator" and played by episode guest star Tom Hanks

the joke, in a nutshell, is that nothing about the character of David S. Pumpkins makes sense. he's not scary in the way actors in a haunted house usually are, and everything about him- from the garish suit, to the bride-of-frankenstein streak of white in his hair, to the b-boying skeletons- is only related to Halloween by vague adherence to a general theme. the guests insists that they don't get it, they demand to know what his "deal" is, unable to grasp that he has no deal- he's just David Pumpkins, man. and the skeletons, by their own admission, are "part of it."

but i submit to you that this walking non-sequitur is the most perfect representation of modern Halloween to emerge so far this century

there was a time when Halloween had a deeper meaning to most Americans. even those that didn't consider themselves especially spiritual recognized that the holiday had ties to the traditional harvest festivals of old, and an air of persistent superstitiousness lingered into contemporary times, well past the time when many were beginning to dismiss such beliefs (a phenomenon famously put to film by the 1993 cult class "Hocus Pocus")

the turn of the century, however, marked a strict departure into powerful commercialism. Halloween shifted into a mostly secular occasion to dress up and party, a holiday that exists not out of observation of the Solstice or the Equinox, but rather for its own sake

David S. Pumpkins is the avatar of this way of thinking, this transformation of Halloween from Ceremony to Celebration

clad in a cheap polyester suit that wouldn't be out of place on Party City's clearance rack (perhaps labeled "Pumpkin Man" or "Spooky Suit") and accompanied by hastily (read: cheaply) assembled b-boying skeletons, the character reflects what Halloween has become. the holiday isn't about any kind of harvest festival, or even about being scary in particular. to the 21st century American, Halloween is about Halloween- references to universal symbols like pumpkins and bats and ghosts for the sake of the fact that the symbols themselves are known to be shorthand for Halloween, rather than anything they might actually represent. even the costumes themselves signify nothing except themselves, serving as a play opportunity for children, and a party admission stamp for adults

our modern Halloween is a xerox of a xerox, an endlessly reflecting funhouse mirror out of which David S. Pumpkins has stepped, fully formed and self-evident

he's the perfect Halloween mascot for the modern age. and that's why we love him.