The other day I was watching Comedy Central at one o'clock in the afternoon, because I am a loser and I have no life, when a commercial came on for the show "The Graham Norton Effect." In case you're smart enough to not watch Comedy Central, The Graham Norton Effect is a talk show hosted by a flamboyantly gay English guy named Graham Norton who wears suits that look like they were made out of your widowed grandmother's couch. The show derives 100 percent of its humor from Norton lisping, in an English accent, "I am such a poof, which is an English word for cigarette, oh did I mention that we call cigarettes fags!" and then interviewing RuPaul by flailing a dildo around and proclaiming "I like sticking things in me bum cause I'm a cigarette!" and then everybody laughs because it's hilarious that he's gay.

Anyway this got me thinking "oh boy I really can't wait until the gay fad is over." Now don't get me wrong; when I say that there is a "gay fad" I don't mean that there is a huge emergence of people becoming gay because they were peer pressured to do so. To say that there is a gay fad does not infer that a lot of people have become gay in recent times. The gay fad is the recent national, pop-culture trend that has spawned countless sitcoms about sodomites, home-decorating shows and metrosexuality.

But the idea of a fad overtaking the nation's media, and thus everyone who bases their lives around the nation's media, is hardly new. There is always a fad in this country, although it is not always based on sexual orientation. Remember the swing fad a few years ago? Out of no where all the songs in the country featured big-band orchestras and had lyrics about zoot suits, prohibition and Warren G. Harding. And then when a former generic member of Menudo named Ricky Martin had a smash single, the entire country started doing sexy flamenco dance moves while yelling "Ole! Hola amigo! Donde esta el bano!" while eating salsa and drinking Coronas.

And who could forget the "heroin chic" fad in the mid '90s, when all super models weighed seventeen pounds (combined) and there was nothing sexier than being covered in hideous, dark splotches and having huge clumps of hair littering the ground you walk on. The point is that every once in a while something gets real popular by way of, oh I don't know, a television show about a group of delightful gay men who go around making jokes about how straight men wear ugly clothes, or something like that.

But these fads never last. Except when they later "come back" and are declared "retro-kitsch." But for the most part, how many times have you swing danced recently? And that was a retro fad anyway, which means the next time it comes back it will be retro-retro. But there is always at least one fad that is sweeping the nation at any given time. And fads always die, at least until they come back as retro-kitsch. So when the nation as a whole decides that it no longer finds homosexuals to be charming and hilarious, what fad will replace the gay fad?

Will we have a Muslim fad in this country? Will the hip thing to do for all the nation's teenagers and eventually the parents of teenagers in bad movies be to pray to the west eight times a day and make sure that all women's faces are covered? Or will the next hot fad be an Eskimo fad? Or a cowboy fad? Or a gorilla pirate fad? Or maybe even a violently right-wing, Christian-Right fad that will have all cool kids wearing shirts that say "Darwin was wrong" and beating up all the effeminate kids in drama club until they realize that Jesus won't love them until they stop being so queer. I mean of course since that would be a fad, none of those kids would actually mean that; they would just say that because it's what the fad dictates. Obviously.

So what do I think will be the next big thing that prompts all stand-up comedians to ask "so what's the deal with all this talk about __________ I keep hearing?" Well, thank you for asking! Personally, I think the next big fad will be white trash. Rednecks, hillbillies, impoverished southerners, po' people. The hip fashion scene will be filled with people smoking crystal meth and drinking Natural Ice in their double-wides, and all those guys who now walk around with spiky, blond-frosted hair and frilly, silky shirts will be wearing white tank-tops and punching their girlfriends in the eye. Not because they really want to, but because that's the popular thing to do, and peer pressure is a monster that must be appeased.

What evidence do I have to support this boastful claim? Well, there are lot's of TV shows and promotions that use white trash as a gimmick. Did you know Jeff Foxworthy has a show again? What the hell? And if you're a normal person, you're asking "Jeff Foxworthy had a show once?" Yup. Foxworthy had a sitcom back in 1995 (and as a bizarre side note, his fictional children in the show were played by the kid from "The Sixth Sense" and the kid from "Jerry Maguire). But Foxworthy's success on a comedy tour appropriately named "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" prompted some idiot to give Foxworthy and his idiot friends the opportunity to do a sketch-comedy show. That means that instead of doing traditional sitcom humor ("Men ALWAYS leave the toilet seat up!", "Women like to SHOP!", "Dads are DUMB!") Foxworthy has a show doing traditional redneck humor ("buttsex is FUNNY!), which is somehow worse than traditional sitcom humor, and that is really saying a lot.

But you might be saying "Shut up, moron! There have been redneck references in pop culture for years! What's different about now?" Well screw you, jerk! The reason you see things like awful movies like "Joe Dirt" or that movie a few years back based on "The Beverly Hillbillies" starring Ernest of "Ernest" fame, is because this country is and has always been actually full of rednecks, and there has been a lot of crap pandering to them. But the difference between the past and now is that the concept of "white trash" or "redneck" is starting to becoming gimmicky, as in there are people who don't normally like Nascar but would have a Nascar-themed party, just because it strikes them as a wacky and funny thing to do. TV networks are starting to apply this gimmick as well. UPN, or the WB, or one of those crappy networks, had a show about two guys with mullet hairstyles who live in a trailer and have wacky adventures, and it was creatively called "The Mullets" (it might still be on the air; I only say "had" because I would assume that a merciful and just God would put a stop to that pretty quick).

But the biggest evidence of an on-coming white-trash fad is this: during my freshman year in college I took this one communications class about giving speeches that is a requirement at my school. During our first speech assignments, one girl gave a presentation about the mullet hairstyle. At the time I thought it was clever and witty, but then again this was 2001. If somebody gave that same speech today, I would think it was annoying and hackneyed. And that's really the first sign of an inevitable fad; you're completely sick of it before it ever actually "starts."