How Failure, Rejection and Insane Clown Posse Made Me a Better Writer and a Better Human Being

Like many of y’all, I have been watching the Britney Spears documentary Framing Britney with a complex, intense series of emotions: anger, disgust and empathy but also with no small amount of guilt. 

For just under a quarter century I have made my living as part of the same pop culture media that has treated Spears with a casual sadism that is absolutely horrifying, if not downright sociopathic. 

I’m not Perez Hilton, a paparazzi or a US photo editor, thank God, and my older sister raised me to be a good feminist. I will be the first to concede, however, that particularly in the early days of my career my writing was not characterized by an excess of sensitivity. 

I started writing for the entertainment section of The Onion when I was 21. I was just a kid who desperately wanted to make a name for himself and an impression on readers and I certainly wasn’t going to do so with the elegance of my prose or the sophistication of my ideas. 

I don’t go back and read my old reviews because that’s not my particular brand of crazed narcissism but also because I suspect that I would be embarrassed by the clumsiness of my writing. But I suspect that I would be even more ashamed by the nastiness as well. 

I’ve grown the fuck up over the course of my twenty-four years in the business. But I’ve also evolved with the times. The world is a dramatically different place than it was in 1997, when I started freelancing for The A.V Club. We’re infinitely more sensitive when it comes to the power of words and ideas and the pervasiveness of institutional racism, sexism and homophobia. 

But I’ve also been lucky to have the universe check me at various points in my life and my career in ways that were sometimes excruciatingly painful in the moment but helped me grow in the long term. 

For example when my debut memoir was reviewed in The Washington Post the critic panned it largely on the grounds that The A.V Club was too mean, dubbing me the “snarkitect” behind the site’s nasty tone. 

Needless to say, I did not think of myself as particularly snarky at all, let alone a snarkitect but the review made me want to be the antithesis of a snarkitect. It made me want to purge snark from my writing altogether. 

The Washington Post’s pan drove home just how powerful and destructive a critic’s ill-chosen words can be, how they can legitimately devastate the person being written about. I’m not sure I ever realized just how much awful power I held as a pop culture writer before I read the meanest review I would ever receive from one of the most respected publications in the world. As a critic, I didn’t want to ever make anyone who didn’t deserve it feel as wounded and misunderstood as I felt after reading that review for the first time.

I’m not proud to admit that I sold what would become You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me as Confessions of a Pop Culture Masochist. I originally conceived of the book as a snarky, satirical evisceration of some of the most mocked and mockable fans in all of pop culture. 

I discovered deep into the project that I could not write the book I was legally, professionally and morally obligated to write because my heart was not in it. I remember reading what I’d written about the first Gathering of the Juggalos I'd attended in its roughest form and being mortified at how empty and mean-spirited it felt. 

I had a nervous breakdown, more or less, and realized that the book I needed to write wasn't mean or snarky or cruel but rather empathetic, sincere and nakedly emotional. I couldn’t write a book about looking down derisively from a place of unearned superiority at Phish fans and Juggalos but I could and would write a book about becoming a Juggalo and Phish fan and how both acts and their fans are tragically misunderstood.

People have made historically fun of Insane Clown Posse for the same reason they have mocked Britney Spears: she was a huge, easy, popular target, a walking punchline everyone could look down on in often explicitly class-based terms. And they could do so with impunity because for a very long time the only rules when it came to making fun of Insane Clown Posse and Britney Spears was that you could never be mean or personal enough.

Before I became immersed in the world of Insane Clown Posse I did not see the harm in people making fun of Juggalos. If laughing derisively at these literal clowns made people happy and brought them joy, then where was the harm in that?

I know better now. These days when I finish a piece I don’t just ask myself if it is funny or good. I also ask myself if it is sensitive, ethical and kind.

The thing about mean-spirited humor and comedy rooted in cruelty, classism and snark is that when the cheap buzz of glib mockery wears off, and it wears off quickly, all that’s left is the cruelty, the ugly, degrading, dehumanizing meanness of treating vulnerable human beings as jokes. 

With Britney Spears that cheap buzz wore off ages ago and all that is left is the unconscionable ugliness and cruelty that defined the way we treated Britney and countless pop stars like her, largely if not exclusively female. 

Before I started work on what would become You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me I lazily bought into the conventional wisdom that Insane Clown Posse were terrible influences on some of the worst people alive. 

I know differently now. It’s no exaggeration to say that listening to ICP, I mean really listening to them, and their fans, has made me a better writer and also a better, more empathetic human being. 

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