green monster recommendations #2
nathan fielder and hua hsu
You may have noticed that debrief has gotten a bit of a makeover! For the past few months, I’ve been working with Anja Korosec, an art director and graphic designer, to create a cohesive online brand identity. If you like minimalist, modern designs, check out her work! She is a joy to work with and a light of a human being.
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve rhapsodized about how much I hate certain people because I’m a Really Jealous Bitch (RJB). Which means it’s time for another installation of Green Monster Recommendations—recommendations generated not from my love, but from my jealousy. Seethe! (Read in the tone of Enjoy!)
nathan fielder—vanguard of cringe comedy.
I did not appreciate Nathan Fielder or cringe comedy upon first viewing. If I had to describe cringe comedy, I would refer you to one New York Times journalist’s attempt to interview the co-creators of cringe comedy show I Think You Should Leave, Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin:
Robinson ordered drunken spaghetti with tofu — spicy — and, almost immediately, the spaghetti started to make his voice hoarse. He insisted, however, that this had nothing to do with the spice — in fact, he said, his food wasn’t spicy enough. I asked our server if she could go spicier. She brought out a whole dish of special chiles. Robinson spooned them enthusiastically over his noodles.
. . . .
Netflix P.R. had very clearly forced them to meet with me against their will. (They agreed, after many weeks of pressure, to an 8 p.m. dinner at a restaurant that closed at 9.) They were friendly, but in the way you might be friendly to a dentist who is about to extract your wisdom teeth.
I tried my favorite icebreaker question: “What is your very first memory?”
Robinson said he couldn’t remember one. Neither could Kanin.
“How many alternate titles did you guys have before you settled on ‘I Think You Should Leave’?” I asked.
“That’s a great question,” Robinson said.
“We had a lot,” Kanin said.
“What were some of them?” I asked.
They couldn’t remember.
That’s how it went the whole time. Our conversation never took off. And the topic we kept returning to, the thing that flowed most naturally, was our small talk about spicy food.
“Hey, that’s something good for the interview,” Robinson said.
“That could be the headline,” Kanin said. “TIM ROBINSON LIKES IT SPICY.”
Robinson spooned more chiles onto his noodles.
Are you wincing? Stewing in discomfort? Fighting your flight response from a conversation you weren’t even a part of?
That’s cringe—and for some people, comedy.
When my partner first showed me clips from Nathan For You, I wrote it off as dumb pranks dreamed up by a teenage boy who now had the financial and career capital as an adult to act them out. I watched as Nathan placed an alligator (fake but surprisingly lifelike) in a room of a local electronics store trying to compete with Best Buy (a classic David vs. Goliath tale!). An expensive TV, priced at $1, is on the other side of the alligator, and customers must dress in black tie in order to have the chance to buy the TV for the low, low price of a buck.
I stared at my own TV screen, blinking, arranging my face into the expression I reserve for when I’m buying response time so I can survey the reactions of those around me first. Was this funny? Stupid? Both? My partner was trying his best not to burst out laughing. Tears gathered in the corner of his eyes from the effort.
It wasn’t until I watched The Curse, the 2023 show co-created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, that I appreciated the potential of cringe comedy. Whereas I found Nathan For You too outlandish to take seriously (would a local electronics store owner really allow Nathan to run a $1 TV black-tie alligator campaign?), The Curse employs cringe comedy in the everyday.
That outwardly normal exchange between you and your colleague that you keep replaying in your mind, where you aren’t sure if they were being passive aggressive, condescending, or simply playful? Those mundane moments abound in The Curse. The HGTV show they’re shooting a pilot for is called Fliplanthropy. Emma Stone’s character insists ad nauseam that her mirrored homes are capital-A Art. And you, the viewer, must stream The Curse through Showtime on Paramount+ (on Android TV or Apple TV or Roku or Amazon Fire TV or your desktop web browser). The result is biting.
And I loved it. I thought it was Art with a capital A. Which tracks with the show’s Rotten Tomatoes scores—94% for critic reviews and 42% for audience reviews. Modern Art, after all, is deeply divisive.
I also hated that I loved it, hated that Nathan Fielder’s immature cringe comedy had mutated into a configuration which I now concede is Art. Here was this man who did magic—magic!—as a teenager,1 incredibly awkward, not incredibly good-looking—succeeding both artistically and commercially (he has an HBO show now, The Rehearsal, and executive produced How To with John Wilson, an inspo show for a dream future project of mine).
The part that really irks me, though—really gets under my skin—is how Nathan embraced the cringe in everyday life. Sure, we’ve all had awkward moments before—mentors who end up venting to you about their unhappinesses when you’re ostensibly seeking their counsel, dates who teeter confusingly between disinterest and clinginess—but you know what I did with those uncomfortable moments?
I changed myself so I could try and make them less awkward in the future. I replayed the moments over and over in my mind, looking for ways to appropriately console mentors during a sudden role reversal or win over fickle dates by mirroring or negging, as the occasion calls for. I worked harder than ever to smooth over social wrinkles instead of accepting that sometimes, wrinkles are just a part of life.
In retrospect, that’s pretty cringe. Maybe it will be funny someday.
hua hsu—professor, writer, pulitzer prize winner.
Someone at my publisher advised me to start thinking about the customer journeys for my book—where the book will sit in a bookstore, the other authors flanking my name, the specific groups of people who will put their hands/cursors on my book and decide to Add to Cart, physically and digitally. “Focus on really speaking to the first 10,000 readers,” she told me. She could tell that I, coming from the algorithmic world of social media, was getting way too in my own head about how to cater to virality.
That’s how I found myself at Barnes & Noble on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. I’d closed my umbrella and walked over to the Biography & Memoir section—four bookcases, the same number as the Business section (another section that I’m considering for my book), more than Philosophy but fewer than Self-Transformation—standing for so long that I didn’t realize my umbrella had dripped a healthy volume of fresh rainwater onto the laminate floor. If I were pregnant, I would have thought my water broke.
I was embarrassed—how could I have made such a mess??—and debated speed-walking away from the crime scene before the lawyer in me fixated on the slip-and-fall situation I’d just created. (A law school exam hypo for Torts: If I walk away and Harry slips and falls in the puddle two minutes later, what claims does Harry have against me? Against Barnes & Noble? What if Harry’s slip-and-fall occurred an hour after I’d walked away?)
I decided I couldn’t subject Barnes & Noble, one of the last bastions against Amazon, to premises liability. I sheepishly skulked over to the cash register and reported my own spill. I then stood watch to the right of the puddle, worrying that someone might slip and fall in the interim, until an employee came over with a handful of paper towels.
The employee threw them down on the rainwater, commenting, “Wow, what happened here?” If this were cringe comedy, the camera would zoom in slowly on my face as I stand off to the side pretending to browse the shelves, agonizing over whether to stay silent and pretend I was merely a passer-by or to admit that it was me.
The guilt eventually got to me, and I told them what had happened and apologized profusely. It wasn’t fair that they had to clean up my mess. In the middle of my third sorry, the agnostic’s penance, a book caught my eye—Stay True by Hua Hsu. There was a sticker on the book (fake, I believe) stating, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
I don’t know what exactly drew me to Stay True.* Its bright orange cover? The Pulitzer Prize? The unabashedly Taiwanese name? (In elementary school, one of our projects was to write and illustrate a book. I put a pen name on the front, C.C. Solano, because even at that age, I had already internalized the impossibility of my name in America, stemming from years of awkward long pauses from teachers and substitutes after Rachel Wong announced that she was “here.”)
The rest of the day, I was haunted by Stay True. I checked the audiobook out from the library (thanks, Libby!) and began listening to it during my morning routine. I went in wanting to hate it—I imagined any book that wins the Pulitzer Prize must be horribly pretentious and verbose—and wound up obsessed with Hua Hsu. I carefully combed through his Wikipedia page for hints of a blueprint on how to become him. (Should I apply for a Ph.D. in literature or history or sociology? Should I make my own zine? Should I redouble my efforts at breaking into academia?)
Professor Hsu’s writing is straightforward, florid only sparingly and even then beautifully. He lets the construction of his narrative—not the style, as many writers are wont to do—seep into the crevices of his readers’ minds. As a result, I experienced, rather than was told, the story. It’s incredibly effective.
Naturally, I hate him.
Part of me hates him because Stay True challenges many excuses for my own writing. As I anticipate my book flopping (social media brain, ugh), I find myself coming up with preemptive reasons why I failed. I don’t have an M.F.A. I’m not literary. (Actually, I don’t even know what “literary” really means.) I’m just a dumb influencer who got a book deal; you can’t expect that much from me uwu. I’m also a dumb influencer who’s unable to consistently post on social media while writing, which undoubtedly dooms the marketing and reception for my book.
I can come up with a million reasons for future failures, for these quantum disappointments. But Professor Hsu doesn’t have an M.F.A. He doesn’t have social media. He simply wrote a damn good book. ◆
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I don’t actually hate magicians. Like any committed RJB, I can always find fault with someone’s past or looks or personality or knees if I’m jealous of them enough. I just wanted to lash out at Nathan.
I looovee this seriesssss!!!!!