Yuppie - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, a "satire of yuppie excess"
• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (McInerney himself has been called "the archetypal yuppie")
• Family Ties, the TV show, features a young Michael J. Fox as the Republican coat-and-tie-wearing 'yuppie-in-the-making' Alex P. Keaton and his parents (played by Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney) as former hippies.
• Fight Club, the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel and 1999 film adaptation, follows "a disenchanted yuppie ... numbed by the sterile materialism of modern life."
• In John Carpenter's They Live, a pair of working class protagonists come into possession of sunglasses that reveal yuppies as predatory aliens.
• Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace, a short story about a young Republican after enjoying life after prep school with a group of punk rockers.
• Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz describes a later (early 1990s) evolution of the Yuppie, in which the upper tier made considerably more than the lower, supporting tier, the "slaves" of the title, who were trapped by rents and insufficient salaries into a struggle merely to stay afloat in Manhattan.
• American Psycho, the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel and 2000 film about yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman.
• thirtysomething, U.S. TV series, seen as a representation of "yuppie angst" and midlife crisis.
• Stuff White People Like, a satirical blog that pokes fun at generalizations and yuppie culture.
• Wall Street, the 1987 film about stock traders, has been described as "encapsulation of 80s yuppie greed culture", particularly Bud Fox, Charlie Sheen's naive 20-something character.
• "Yuppy Love", a 1989 Only Fools and Horses episode based on Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, in which Del Boy reinvents himself as a yuppy and hangs out in trendy wine bars.
• National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, a 1989 comedy, features neighbors Todd and Margo as the quintessential yuppies.
• Married with Children, a Fox TV comedy sitcom (1987–97) featured the Bundy's neighbors: A couple led by twice married Marcy D'Arcy (her two husbands Steve Rhodes and Jefferson D'Arcy, are upwardly mobile men she's attracted to), a bipolar paleoliberal-neoconservative feminist banker who loathes their blue-collar neighbors and she bullies Al Bundy, a failed shoe salesman.
• Jeff Goldblum's character in the 1983 movie The Big Chill is a quintessential yuppie who sold out his 1960s hippie ideals for money.
• The Last Days of Disco features male characters in the early 1980s who complain that they are referred to as yuppies.
• King of the Hill features the Hill Family's next door neighbors, Kahn Souphanousinphone, Sr. and his wife, Minh. They are stereotypical yuppies based on that stereotype about Asian Americans since Khan and Minh are Laotians originally from Laos then moved to the U.S. through Anaheim, California, a known yuppie cultural center in Southern California and finally they ended up in fictional Arlen, Texas.
• "Yer So Bad" song by Rock singer Tom Petty features the verse "My sister got lucky, Married a Yuppie"
• "Paranoid Android", a song from Radiohead's OK Computer album, features the lines "The dust and the screaming | The yuppies networking"