h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of the best ways to start is to affect a posh British accent. Bonus points awarded if you can get people to believe that you lived in the UK.

By far the best place to be pretentious is New York City. You don't have to live there, but you have to know enough about it to subtly drop comments about it. Have a great disdain for any tourist attraction, and frequent the MoMA. Also, find an out of the way art gallery and give them some money.

If you don't want to be a New Yorker, then you have to swear allegiance to one of the Ivy League schools and have a convincing argument about how one's moral fibres are weakened in such an unhealthily crowded atmosphere or something. Yale is the most pretentious place, but you can easily get away with Harvard or Princeton. Brown is possible, but you have to be a bit of an eccentric to pull it off, and sneer at those who don't know the value of a real education. If you choose this route, you're allowed to watch sports, but only college matches involving your school.

Once you've convinced people that you come from a pretentious place, you also have to be able to drop a few famous names. If ou can wrangle an invitation to a charity gala, you're all set because thn you can claim to know whichever famous persons were in attendance. Directors are good people to meet, movie stars less so but you can pull it off if you only refer to their most obscure film and mourn how they sold out.

Televisions are acceptable if you only watch PBS. Masterpiece Theatre is good, as well as anything British (except for Red Dwarf and Robot Wars). You can argue how Monty Python opened up and new television oeuvre, but can't know too much else about it.

If your art gallery shows films, go. Coffeehouses are acceptable for a once-a-month-loosening-up sort of activity, but don't actually frequent one. They're for a different sort of pretentious crowd.

That reference to Python prompts me to enquire whether it's OK to know the quote from Fawlty Towers about pretentiousness - and quote it.

Quote away.

All quotes from a suitable source are by definition pretentious. After all, it's not what you say, it's who said it first - and that you know that someone else knows that you know who it was.

As it were.

Is Fawlty Towers itself pretentious then? I don't know anything about Fawlty Towers, except for that quote about pretentiousness. Or is it just pretentious to quote from Fawlty Towers? Or is it only pretentious if you are quoting about pretentiousness?

Puzzled of Barking writes: How does a pretentious person deal with a Premonstratensian?

And Jumpy of Colombey-les-deux-Eglises writes: How does a pretentious person deal with a Premenstrualtensian?