A golden age for dumb guys
Dan Ozzi on Danny McBride's Thrilling Tales of Modern Men
Dumb Funny Shit for (Gender Neutral) Dudes Week continues at Hell World today with our man Dan Ozzi writing about Danny McBride's new book of short stories Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, Tim Robinson, Conner O’Malley and the dumbest shit of them all Mr. Donald Trump.
Be sure to also read this amazing piece by Niko Stratis on the legacy of the Jackass films. One of the best in a while.
"I didn't expect to end up crying after reading a review of Jackass" many have been saying.
Luke O’Neil
"They showed me a better example of masculinity than I had ever seen before, and modeled a creative use for self-destructive desires, that they might lead to glorious self-expression. That I never ended up being a man at all is no one's fault, it’s just that I wanted to stop being alive, and start living, and to do so meant learning to do a controlled explosion of the self."
In a decidedly less funny vein this recent one by Josh Caress if perfect for the holiday weekend. Lot of great talking points if you want to turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit.
Luke O’Neil
"At every turn, embracing American identity has meant choosing a false reality over a true one. This is how the nation was conceived, how it has operated, and what it continues to do. This is what settler colonialism is: the forced replacement of reality with fantasy. This is also why the fantasy is indispensable. To question it is to unravel the whole thing. And so every time a crack is revealed, there are always those ready to plug the hole with new iterations of the myth. We can’t let it go."
This will be sent out in the next edition of the newsletter.
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What is this fuckin' guy's deal?
by Dan Ozzi
It has been said countless times, but if it weren’t for the looming sense of societal collapse, the Trump administration would be the most hilarious era of history to live through. Every day the world watches with morbid curiosity as this big dumb oaf accidentally gets himself stuck in an entirely avoidable jam, whether it’s something as dire as a war with Iran or as frivolous as renovating a pool, and spends the subsequent days and weeks and months fucking up all aspects of it in ways that would make Mr. Bean blush, scrambling on the spot and pulling nonsense out of his internet-melted brain on national television. It’s all very funny if you can stomach it.
The cycle has been playing out the same, predictable way for over a decade now. First comes the fuck up. Maybe he has conjured a fact or statistic out of thin air, something he half-remembered one of the morning show toadies say on Fox News. Maybe he has made up a new kind of math where it’s possible for drug prices to fall by 500, 600 percent. Thousands of percents. “It’s amazing, really, when you think about it,” he says, trusting that no one will actually think about it.
Act two is the double down. Even when presented with the irrefutable facts of reality, he insists he is right. He flails. He digs in deeper. He calls anyone questioning him “very stupid” and “piggy.” This is a man whose ego is so fragile that he finds it easier to try to gaslight every single person on earth than to ever, even once, admit fault.
The third act is less funny, when he simply decides it’s time to move on from this mess of his own making. One which is usually so egregious it would have cost literally any level of employee their job at literally any company. Yet for the most powerful dumb guy alive it is just another Tuesday.
It’s not surprising that this period of consequence-free incompetence has been a fertile time for male comedians who can satirize this sort of toxic masculinity that is rapidly eating society from the inside like a cancer. (Perfect timing then for Tim Heidecker and The Onion to relaunch Infowars yesterday as a parody of disgraced tinfoil hat conspiracist Alex Jones.) But the three comedians best capturing the defects of today’s men are Tim Robinson, Conner O’Malley, and Danny McBride, who have all created their own distinct cinematic universes of toxic guys.
Robinson is a savant at portraying men who take things way too far and have a clinical inability to pick up on social cues. A typical character is the last guy in the room to realize that the problem, actually, has been him this entire time. In most I Think You Should Leave sketches, Robinson gets backed into a corner of his own wrongdoing until he ultimately vomits, melts down, or simply runs off screaming.
O’Malley’s guys exist on a similar wavelength but their damage is a direct product of the late-capitalist manosphere. He plays the kinds of men who have had their minds warped by decades of podcasters selling them unregulated brain pills, gas station energy drinks, Pornhub gooning, vape tricks, Worldstar videos, rap battles, Deadpool humor, and a certain intangible spiritual quality we’ll call Jokerfication.
And then there are the guys of Danny McBride’s world. Loud, narcissistic, arrogant. Infallible protagonists of their own reality. But unlike Robinson and O’Malley, who largely work in short-burst sketches and clips, McBride has had more room to flesh out his flawed male characters across multi-season episodic TV shows, and he’s used that space to give them a depth that’s not always evident for the other two.
Maybe depth is too strong a word. Let’s call it a motive—a tiny bit of insight into their inner-workings that might provide more context and make them less two-dimensional, or at least provide an answer to the question: What’s this guy’s fuckin’ deal anyway?
To make audiences laugh at dumb men is easy, but McBride has taken the harder route of eliciting empathy. A hyper-cocky washed up athlete is a funny premise, but what made Eastbound and Down’s Kenny Powers one of TV’s all-time greatest characters was the war within himself to kill his own massive ego in order to find peace. Behind the bravado there was a pair of sad eyes that had seen the mountaintop to which his talents had taken him and had subsequently spent every day since watching the descent brought on by his own hubris. Same goes for The Righteous Gemstones’ Jesse Gemstone, a swaggering preacher driven by his need to be perceived as the alpha male in a family of tremendous means that he believes himself entitled to simply by being born into it.
McBride made his literary debut last week, releasing the collection of short stories Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. McBride the author writes like a TV script writer. No flowery prose or fancy literary devices. Just dialogue and action. For anyone who has followed his acting career, the characters in these short stories will seem familiar. In fact, it’s downright impossible to read the quotes in them without hearing McBride speaking. What other voice could possibly come to mind when reading a character say “I have to do diarrhea?”
Like his TV characters, the ones in his short stories are largely insecure men driven by a singular unaddressed issue. Just about every story follows a man who has not come to terms with grief, or a divorce, or being laid off. Instead of confronting these things head-on, they go through great lengths to compensate and drag everyone around them down with them in the process. In the opening story a divorced dad who only sees his kids twice a month decides to quit his job to pursue stunt magic. In another a man copes with guilt over his wife’s death by making threats to a successful author who he believes has stolen his life’s story. A third endures an extreme experimental procedure to deal with the insecurity stemming from his hair loss.
None of these men ever face their trauma directly. None of them ever take accountability or admit wrongdoing. And they certainly never apologize for anything. They feel misunderstood, but were never given, nor worked toward, the communication tools to properly express themselves. Thrilling Tales of Modern Men is the “men would rather ____ than go to therapy” meme playing out over 354 pages.
“With a lot of the characters that I’ve written about, I think their morals and their values and how they see themselves [are questionable]. But I also think their biggest advocates are themselves. They have some sort of understanding of who they think they are that doesn’t usually align with the way others see them. There’s always this constant sort of need to prove oneself or to step over the line of what’s decent in order to get you to where you need to be,” McBride told The Ringer’s Alan Siegel.
Fragile masculinity is obviously not a new phenomenon. Look through the history section at any library and you’ll find countless books about countless men who have done their part in ruining the planet by stepping over the line to prove themselves. But there is a commonality among the toxic males of today’s society that many journalists have tried to dissect over the last few years. They’ve blamed it on the “male loneliness epidemic” and “the breadwinner dilemma” and “social isolation.” McBride does not need to delve too deep into the psychology of it all. He has an innate handle on why men are the way they are today. Simply put, they were raised for a world that never came to be. McBride’s modern men are the products of a time when boys were reared to be strong and masculine and take up space. This archetype has gone extinct, or was at least on the way toward going extinct for a while there in today’s world, so they must keep one foot in an alternate reality where they are still useful and dominant.
“Growing up in the ’80s, you were being sold machismo, action, ‘kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out,’” McBride explained to the New York Times’ David Marchese. “That was pounded into anyone’s brains that came up on cable television or watching movies. I think it took me a little while to realize that’s not real life. That’s not how things work. Maybe there is this slow waking of, like, everything I’ve been told isn’t necessarily how it’s supposed to be, and then it’s that awkwardness of finding out what is important to you or what your values are.”
Thrilling Tales of Modern Men finds men at that intersection, where the promise of the past has collided with the reality of the present. It has left men stumbling around, searching for purpose in a world in which they’re not really needed, and making it everyone else’s problem as they struggle to figure it out. It’s all very funny if you can stomach it.
Dan Ozzi is the author of three books including SELLOUT: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994 - 2007). He writes about music, books, and other crap at his beloved and wildly popular newsletter ZERO CRED.
Dan previously wrote for Hell World about his favorite Weezer songs:
Luke O’Neil
His ancestral homeland of Staten Island:
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And the funniest moments of the first Trump administration:
Luke O’Neil
He and I talked about his book Sellout here:
Luke O’Neil