The Benefits of a Weird Education — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Despite being a product of the Chicago public educational system I’ve been blessed to have had both a good education and a weird education.

I received my good education from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where I got a degree in Communication Arts with a concentration on radio, television and film in 1999.

My weird education occurred not in classrooms but in the video stores where I worked as a teenager and college student, countless movie theaters throughout the Midwest and South and the offices of The A.V Club and the Dissolve, where I worked for eighteen years as a staff writer during a former life.

I am prouder of the weird education I received than the good education because it has proven infinitely more useful and rewarding. My formal education ended with me receiving a Bachelor’s degree at the turn of the millennium but a weird education never has to end.

That’s true of everyone but it is particularly true of me, since I have had the unimaginable gift of being able to continually learn new things about the world and its wonders and then share that knowledge with y’all.

Since I started freelancing for The A.V Club back in 1997 my life and career have revolved around obsessive, exhaustive study of my fields of interest. I haven’t had to choose between learning and growing and making a decent living because I have had the extraordinary privilege of making a decent living by growing and learning and continually discovering, and then sharing the fruits of my obsessions with readers.

For fourteen years I’ve obsessively studied the world of failure through My World of Flops, first through film and then through everything else. I’m damn proud of the work I have done in that field. I have created a voluminous body of work over the course of the last decade and a half.

I’ve contributed to my weird education and the world’s weird education most literally and directly through The Weird Accordion to Al, first as a column and then as a book and then as a massively expanded book.

I wrote something that I genuinely feel deserves to be taught in classes on parody and pastiche and the art and craft of comedy. I wrote a book that can legitimately teach you a great deal about one of the greatest and most important American artists of the last fifty years.

I don’t know if anyone has used The Weird Accordion to Al that way but if you do want to teach my book I would be happy to do a Zoom with your class and answer any and all questions you might have about my life’s work.

You might say to yourself, who fucking cares about stupid fucking bullshit like self-published satirical novels and the McHale’s Navy movie? Why waste time on obscure crap that profoundly does not matter?

Obsessing about stupid fucking bullshit that no one cares about is the cornerstone of a weird education. Anyone can read about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker but here at the Happy Place we’re eternally more interested in the Star Wars Holiday Special.

I see The Joy of Trash as a seminal text in the weird education offered by this site and its weird proprietor. There are lots of conventional books that can teach you about conventional things but you can only learn about fascinatingly obscure, unimportant bullshit like Peter Criss confronting his alcoholic imposter on Donahue, the “Turtle Club” sequence in The Master of Disguise and Adrien Brody introducing Sean Paul in character from The Joy of Trash. And if you want to learn more about the lives and films of two of our greatest actors you could do a whole lot worse than Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project.

I’ve thought about formalizing the idea of the Happy Place doling out Weird Educations by offering “degrees” based on how much patrons pledge to the site. For example, a yearly subscription of 25 dollars would get you a Bachelor’s in Weird Studies. 35 dollars would get you a Master’s and anyone who pledges 50 bucks gets a Doctorate in Weirdness at the end a 12 month period.

If this idea is anything like all my others, it will be very involved and also exceedingly unsuccessful, and also weird, but that’s no reason not to do it, and a damn good reason to give it a go.

Pre-order The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything and get access to original articles AS I write them and plenty more bonus stuff like exclusive cards featuring Felipe Sobreiro’s amazing artwork for the book at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/cart

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here