What started as an inside joke became mainstream success for Christian Lander, whose "Stuff White People" like quickly turned into a smash hit. Still reeling from his Internet fame, Lander is now finding wider recognition with a new book based on the blog.
The Daily Californian: Where did you get the idea for "Stuff White People Like"?
Christian Lander: It would be great if there was a story of some fantastic, divine inspiration, but my friend and I were both at work, just having an IM conversation about the TV show "The Wire." And my friend, who's Filipino, said he didn't trust any white people who didn't watch "The Wire." And you know how IM conversations go: The next thing you knew, we were saying, "Well, what are they doing instead of watching 'The Wire'?" And we just threw ideas back and forth, like yoga, getting divorced, therapy, and I thought it was a pretty funny conversation, so I was like, OK, blog time, fully expecting it to only be read by him and maybe a few of my friends.
DC: When did you realize that the blog was really taking off?
CL: I honestly never expected it. We figured it would be about a hundred people a day, because you know, if you just put certain words in there, people just find it through weird flukes through Google. Then when I got to about 15 or 20 entries, I thought, you know what, this is pretty funny, I'm going to send it, instead of just to the few friends who would ever read the stuff that I would put up there, I'm going to send it to all my friends. And I don't have a huge amount of friends; I'm talking about 20 people. And they liked it, and they sent it out to their friends, and next thing I know it's mentioned on Comedy Central's main blog and GOOD Magazine's blog. So it went from like a hundred hits a day to 30,000, and I just couldn't believe it. And it just kept getting crazier and crazier after that.
