(Photo by Rachel Sadon)

(Photo by Rachel Sadon)

You first notice one affixed to a newspaper box or slapped on a street grate, and all of a sudden you see them everywhere. A small black square with white text: this is not new york.

Is it a taunt? Some kind of art project? Part of a new Cards Against Humanity deck spilled around the city?

Comparisons to New York City rarely fail to rankle Washingtonians, and bungled attempts from its publications to expound upon food and tourism in the District (even the suburbs aren’t immune!), routinely draw both laughs and censorious articles. The latter, in turn, inspire equally outraged hot takes that argue such defenses make D.C. seem like an insecure backwater, a city filled with hypersensitive whiners.

That is the climate in which the website Stuck in D.C. was born.

Proud Washingtonians, maybe at first befuddled by the stickers, notice the tiny text at the bottom, STUCKINDC.com, and have their fears confirmed. More than one takes to social media to rant. A Washington Post writer amplifies the complaint. An Atlantic writer volunteers to scrape them off.

That is the climate in which Stuck in D.C. thrives.

Once (if) one actually makes it to the website, you find something rather more ambiguous. A small sampling of headlines: “H Street Gentrifier Proud To Live Among Minorities He Fears,” “9 Things Only People Who’ve Moved To Columbia Heights Will Understand,” “I’m A Cherry Blossom Tourist Tourist.” You could almost see these people being totally for real.

It all started with a joke about D.C.’s bodies of standing water, some light verse, and a running joke commentator in our own comments section. Or at least those were the first sparks of ideas, respectively, for each of the three anonymous creators: Walter, Brio, and Xavier From New York.

The three friends (indeed, they are among the horde of millennial newcomers that you keep hearing about) realized that they each had some things to say—some of it funny, some creative, some outraged, all of it content—about the city they found themselves residing in after college. So they made a go of it together.

Walter, a native Minnesotan who spends his days copywriting for a non-profit, explains that they have in common a “basic ambivalence” about the District. “There’s a lot to make fun of about this city, there’s a lot that’s absurd and ridiculous about this city. There’s a lot that I don’t like about this city, particularly among the young white millennial population of which I am a part,” he told DCist a few weeks ago. “But at the same time, this is where we live and there’s a lot of great stuff about this city, too. And so we like to rip it and celebrate it at the same time, to the extent that that’s possible.”

And so they’ve developed a mix of Onion-like satire, Buzzfeed-like stunts, The Toast-like witticisms and a handful of more serious reviews, opinion pieces, reports, and reader submissions.

To protect their professional lives, Walter said when we first spoke, they decided to use pseudonyms. “The general reason is everyone who writes for Stuck in D.C. has a day job and a boss, in addition to really trying hard not to build our personal brands—we’re going the other way.” He now plans to reveal his identity in a Washington Post profile.

Many of the sharpest bites comes from Xavier from New York, who actually is from “the city” and honed his shtick in DCist’s, uh, colorful comments section (for the uninitiated: lots of GIFs, sarcasm, personalities, and inside jokes that have lasted for years). “He thinks it’s so absurd the chip that D.C. has on its shoulder about New York and the arrogance that New York has about D.C. and everywhere else. He’s just having fun with that whole conceit,” Walter explains. Naturally, Xavier’s posts tend to provoke the most rage.

In belated response to a Washington City Paper story about a surge in new “dive” bars, Xavier went ahead and re-christened them thrive bars, defined as a “popular, profitable bar patronized largely by upwardly mobile white millennials with disposable income who relish the establishment’s reputation as a ‘dive bar.’” He writes of a familiar experience to anyone who has been to the Red Derby on a Friday night.

“Hilda lives in tony Glover Park where there are no dive bars. So she chartered an Uber and journeyed across town, meeting me outside of Showtime Lounge on Rhode Island Avenue. Before we went in, she smoked a cigarette as I watched three more Ubers pull up and drop off twentysomethings. Clearly this was a place to be.”

The response, well, it largely gives credence to those of the “cowtown” point of view. “People got so pissed. Like ‘Who is this fucker who came down from New York who thinks he knows?’ Walter recalls. “One comment was ‘Dear Xavier, lay off D.C. We have good bars with fuckable people in them, so lay off.’ Just people embarrassing themselves, like ‘we’re cool.'”

The site also pokes (gentle) fun at the D.C. media—not the behemoths of political journalism, but local sites like PoPville, the City Paper, Washingtonian and, certainly, DCist. “We’re just playing with the form of what a local blog is and just really having fun with the conventions,” Walter says. One of those conventions being the listicle, which is both wildly popular and deeply disdained (if our traffic numbers and social media commentary are to be believed, anyway).

If Stuck in D.C. specializes in anything, it is in off kilter—and often, very funny—rankings. They range from “State-Shaped Cutting Boards, Ranked By Utility,” a pitch perfect response to Washingtonian’s shopping guides, to “D.C.’s 40 Most Ubiquitous Street Stickers,” which is easily the most comprehensive guide to the subject out there.

Which brings us to the sticker (it comes in the 23rd spot on their list with just a three-word comment: “It sure isn’t”). The gag started out as free marketing, a citywide troll that’s become something of a Rorschach test. How you read into it says a lot about what you think about D.C.—and how you assume that other people see D.C.

“’This is not New York’ can be taken so many different ways,” Walter says. “One, it’s just a factual statement: this is not New York. Or it’s like a prideful ‘This is not New York, this is D.C., we rock.’ It could be a ‘Ugh, this is not New York.’ It’s sort of in the eye of the beholder, and we love that.”

Between the stickers and often provocative posts (see: D.C.’s College Kids, Ranked), Stuck clearly hit a nerve. The site gets a couple hundred to a couple thousand hits a day, despite no advertising beyond the stickers.

“Washington, D.C. is easy to satirize and tell jokes about and nobody’s really doing it. There’s quite a window for some really localized humor,” Walter says. “I think we were right. People have responded well to it.”

There is Rock Creek Snark, kind of a localized Onion that hasn’t published in a few months. But in attitude, Stuck is more reminiscent of the defunct The Anti DC. Now a Washington Post sports blogger, Marissa Payne retired the popular blog with the note “D.C. has become a lot more tolerable and I’ve become a bit less of an asshole.”

Stuck in D.C. has taken up the mantle.

Filed Under: satire, stuck in dc,