Scans_Daily

"Everyone talks about “cancel culture,” but I don’t think anyone agrees about what “cancel culture” really means. Was Louis CK cancelled, for instance? He lost a lot of his audience when the New York Times wrote a story surfacing his past behavior toward nonconsenting women. But he’s still doing comedy gigs and podcasting and, presumably, making money. He’s just not making as much money or speaking to as big an audience as before. So was he cancelled or did he just face consequences? There’s a lot of hypocrisy and sanctimony in the air around cancel culture, especially as it pertains to comedy, and that makes it a ripe target for satire."

- Paul Constant


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"I’ve been writing professionally on the internet since the heyday of blog culture—so, 2006, 2007. And I’ve always had a sick fascination with trolls and the way that people are activated and radicalized by online communities. And in the last fifteen years, as internet culture has moved onto social media, that sickness has only accelerated. Like many Comics Beat readers, I’ve watched comics fans my age and demographic—white, middle-aged men—tip over into racist, sexist, and even fascist ideologies.

Writing is how I figure things out, and so I created Snelson as a thought experiment: What if, like many of my former high school classmates on Facebook, I believed I had peaked in the 1990s? What if my nostalgia for a perfect past that never actually existed caused me to hate the modern world? Once that frame was in mind, Snelson basically popped up, fully formed: A stand-up comedian who almost hit it big in the 1990s but who has spent the last 25 years on the downward slope of fame. Rather than accept his failures and try to grow, Snelson has decided to blame everyone else for his self-sabotage.

It is a huge challenge to write an unlikable lead. Like I said, I wanted to understand how someone becomes an embittered troll—but I absolutely do not want to make trolls sympathetic. Snelson is not the hero of this book, and I have a huge responsibility to ensure that I don’t glamorize him or endorse his beliefs in any way. If a reader were to send me an email saying “Snelson is my hero,” in the way that some misanthropic fans have unironically embraced The Joker or Thanos or Walter White as heroes, I would feel like I failed at my job."

- Paul Constant


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