By Martin H. Levinson
Everyone likes Happy Hour with its cheap drinks, free appetizers, and the opportunity it provides to socialize with friends and associates. But the label is kind of boring and does not consider specific motivations that might draw people to attend what has become an iconic American ritual. Here are four new ways to market that ritual.
Tribal Loyalty Hour
We live in a country consumed by the idea that the groups we belong to are superior to or being victimized by the groups we don’t belong to. This leads us to hate those other groups for taking up space in the world. To find solace, some people tune in to radio and TV talk shows with hosts who say terrible things about the groups they despise. Other people tweet, and even re-tweet, horrible stuff about the groups they loathe. But loathing by one’s lonesome is not as much fun or psychologically reinforcing as being with others who share one’s antipathies.
And so tribal loyalty hour, a stretch in the late afternoon or early evening where you can hunker down with fellow malcontents and over cut-rate drinks and food, rag on all the groups you and they can’t stand. Doing this can be therapeutic and cleanse a person of the ridiculous desire to see individuals as individuals rather than as parts of socially determined units. If tribal loyalty hour had a mantra it might go something like this: “Time is never wasted when you’re wasted with friends and acquaintances who want to waste everyone in groups not like theirs.”
Schadenfreuede Hour
There is a word for the satisfaction you get when your ex-boyfriend’s house burns down or something bad happens to Justin Bieber. It is Schadenfreude, a German-derived word for the happiness obtained from the misery of others, the idea of which is part of the human condition: The French speak of joie maligne, a devilish delight in other people’s anguish. The Japanese have a saying “The misfortune of others tastes like honey.” In Danish it is labeled skadefryd; in Slovak škodoradost; in Mandarin xìng-zāi-lè-huò; and in Russian, zloradstvo. For the Melanesians who live on the remote Nissan Atoll in Papua New Guinea, it is banbanam.
There is no better way to celebrate other people’s grief and bad luck than gathering together in the late afternoon or early evening and toasting to their misfortunes. It’s happy hour on steroids.
Stupid Hour
Stupid Hour goes right to the heart of what drinking is all about, namely permission to suspend your reason and act like a jerk. If you behave badly you can blame it on the alcohol, which, since it’s a liquid without a solid brain, can’t testify in its own defense. Anyway, if everyone is drinking and behaving badly, it’s not about defense. It’s about offense, specifically how offensive can you be.
Life is often not easy and even when it is we still have to be alert and guard against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But no one can be on guard 24/7. Sometimes we just want to let our hair down and act silly. And that means having a little drinkypoo or, if drinks are on sale, maybe having a couple of little drinkypoos, which on a cost per drink basis makes ordering multiple drinks a sensible idea. But sense is beside the point during Stupid Hour, a time when people can cry into their beer knowing if their tears make their beer taste bad they can always order another for half price.
Bitching Hour
A great way to bond with people is to join them in generalized complaining. That has been true since the time of Adam and Eve, when each of those sinners crabbed to the other about having to leave a carefree existence in heaven for a hardscrabble life on Earth. Cantankerousness is part of humankind’s emotional DNA, like rooting for a local sports team that has no chance of winning or bawling like a baby when you get your cable bill.
Enter Bitching Hour, the perfect occasion for having people meet and over low-cost libations and snacks gripe to each other about how their partner does not understand them, how they hate their jobs, how they wish they were someone else, and how even if they were someone else they wouldn’t be happy. Whining and whiskey, carping and cocktails, moaning and merlot: perfect mixtures for promoting the camaraderie that comes from guzzling and grousing alongside a gaggle of grumbling friends.