Halloween is right around the corner, and I think it’s time for a PSA on costumes.

Halloween, or “All Hallow’s Ween” or whatever silly garbage the ancient Celts called it, is the one day a year a grown human being can masquerade as the Hulk without attracting the unwelcome attention of teenage street toughs. But as with all things that involve candy, children, and the quiet shroud of darkness, there is a right way to do things, and the way that will get you tazed.

The following is a list of costumes that are both terrible and unoriginal. We see each one of these abominations every year, and it’s about time we banded together and stashed them in the closet for good.

 
1. Hot dog

 

2. Corn-on-the-cob

 

3. Sexy Millard Fillmore

 

4. A nineteenth-century southern debutante named “Spaghetti Jones”

 

5. A hot-air balloonist but instead of a basket he’s standing in an old, congealed bowl of chicken corn chowder

 

6. A pirate trying to pronounce “hors d’oeuvres”

 

7. The Lord of the Dance, but for Beyblade

 

8. The old “two holes cut in a sheet” ghost costume, but not using a plain white sheet, but like one with a paisley pattern, or Captain Planet

 

9. An 8-piece set of Hamilton Beach pots and pans marked down to $89.70 because it’s missing a skillet

 

10. Sexy half-eaten Nerds Rope

 

11. If you and your friends are going as a physical representation of a different “I Am the Walrus” verse, then the one about “Sitting on a corn flake”

 

12. I don’t know what this looks like but his name is “Charnold” and he really wants everyone to know how underrated Blind Melon was

 

13. One of those giant banana costumes where the bottom tip of the banana slightly resembles, zomg, a dick

 

14. That “I don’t think those were Lincoln Logs” joke from Toy Story 3

 

15. Squire Mix-a-Lot

 

16. A fully-functioning endocrine system that allows you to visually explain Cushing’s disease to children

 

17. A skeleton that has organs, muscle, skin, and clothes and is just a regular dude not wearing a costume

 

18. A single dad eating a full plate of cold lasagna over an overflowing trash can

 

19. 

 

20. A sexy last unreachable Pringle in the can

 

21. The concept of time

 

22. A single strand of blond hair on your shoulder that your brunette wife finds and you say it’s your costume

 

23. DJ Twerkules, wanted in all fifty states for crimes against humanity

 

24. Not wearing a costume and saying you’re dressed as “the world’s greatest lover” or something. Get out of here with that shit Derek

 

25. Improvised counter space, i.e., a pizza box balanced on top of a series of dirty saucepans

 

26. The oft-forgotten character from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, Skip Dunky, the Beige Ranger

 

27. Something made out of like six paper towel tubes and eight yards of twine, especially if you go around saying something like “the hard part is getting the paper towel tubes to stay on the twine”

 

28. A back scratcher with no regard for the law

 

29. A Street Shark, deep into his fifties, plagued by divorce proceedings and a progressed case of sciatica and feeling like life is not very jawsome at all

 

30. The last person to look up Andy Milonakis’s Wikipedia page

 

31. A bottle of children’s Tylenol with a small, needle-shaped hole poked through the tamper evidence seal

 

32. The mascot for the wildly unpopular snack Measles Crunch, Sick Doug

 

33. A Transformer that you get inside and it transforms into just a small box and you get crushed to death

 

34. A breathalyzer that says “blow me” on the crotch Derek I swear to god

 

35. An alien that looks exactly like one the U.S. government has confined to a laboratory under the deserts of Nevada, and you turn a corner and a pair of agents load you into a van and take you to a place of unimaginable horrors. Days later, the experiments will begin. The living autopsies. The brain mining. The radiation baths. And that is only the beginning. What awaits you in the scant years you have left will leave you hollow, and godless, and bereft of the smallest sliver of self-recognition. You will die less human than the extraterrestrial they think you are.

 

36. A sexy racist Brave Little Toaster

 

 
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “What can I be, then? You just listed like all the costumes.” Dear reader, shut up for a second as I divulge the only appropriate costume to be worn on Halloween 2019: A t-shirt with a werewolf on it above a caption that reads “Happy Howl-o-ween.” Anything else will get you pushed off a wharf and you will deserve it.

For more guides on avoiding Halloween faux pas, try Halloween Candy, Ranked.