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The Joy of Trash
Pop culture writer, author, podcaster and preeminent “Weird Al” Yankovic historian Nathan Rabin loves the objectively terrible. He's spent the last quarter century celebrating the spectacular garbage that makes life worth living. Rabin began his obsession with the abysmal at the The A.V. Club in 1996, where he worked for eighteen years, primarily as the site’s head writer.
It was at The A.V. Club that Rabin began writing My Year of Flops in 2007, a column that introduced the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” into the cultural lexicon, spawned a book adaptation in 2010’s My Year of Flops (Scribner) and is currently in its fourteenth year of operation as My World of Flops on Rabin’s own website.
Rabin left The A.V Club in 2013 to become a staff writer for the short-lived but much loved film website The Dissolve before starting Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place in 2017.
The Joy of Trash collects the best pieces from the Happy Place’s archives alongside 8 new entries on both seasons of Baywatch Nights, Shasta McNasty, Robert Evans’ Get High On Yourself, Adrien Brody’s notoriously ad-libbed introduction for Sean Paul on Saturday Night Live, and more.
The Joy of Trash offers an irreverent alternate history of the past 50 years as seen through the prism of pop culture’s most entertainingly unhinged losers, including the Brady Bunch’s ill-fated variety show, Emeril Lagasse’s sitcom, suicidally depressed fast food pitch-man Mr. Delicious and the misguided literary endeavors of Joan Crawford and Lou Pearlman.
The Joy of Trash doubles as a comic catalog of the cultural horrors that made the Trump years such a surreal nightmare.
In riotously funny chapters illustrated by Felipe Sobreiro, who previously worked with Rabin on The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al, Rabin eviscerates the Fyre Festival, Rachel Dolezal and Milo Yiannopoulos’ mortifying would-be manifestos, Steven Seagal’s Alt-Right thriller, Gal Gadot and friends covering “Imagine”, Kevin Spacey’s Christmas Youube video, Loqueesha, Gotti and, of course, Jeremy Renner’s app.
The Joy of Trash is a very good book about very bad people and very bad entertainment.
It was at The A.V. Club that Rabin began writing My Year of Flops in 2007, a column that introduced the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” into the cultural lexicon, spawned a book adaptation in 2010’s My Year of Flops (Scribner) and is currently in its fourteenth year of operation as My World of Flops on Rabin’s own website.
Rabin left The A.V Club in 2013 to become a staff writer for the short-lived but much loved film website The Dissolve before starting Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place in 2017.
The Joy of Trash collects the best pieces from the Happy Place’s archives alongside 8 new entries on both seasons of Baywatch Nights, Shasta McNasty, Robert Evans’ Get High On Yourself, Adrien Brody’s notoriously ad-libbed introduction for Sean Paul on Saturday Night Live, and more.
The Joy of Trash offers an irreverent alternate history of the past 50 years as seen through the prism of pop culture’s most entertainingly unhinged losers, including the Brady Bunch’s ill-fated variety show, Emeril Lagasse’s sitcom, suicidally depressed fast food pitch-man Mr. Delicious and the misguided literary endeavors of Joan Crawford and Lou Pearlman.
The Joy of Trash doubles as a comic catalog of the cultural horrors that made the Trump years such a surreal nightmare.
In riotously funny chapters illustrated by Felipe Sobreiro, who previously worked with Rabin on The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al, Rabin eviscerates the Fyre Festival, Rachel Dolezal and Milo Yiannopoulos’ mortifying would-be manifestos, Steven Seagal’s Alt-Right thriller, Gal Gadot and friends covering “Imagine”, Kevin Spacey’s Christmas Youube video, Loqueesha, Gotti and, of course, Jeremy Renner’s app.
The Joy of Trash is a very good book about very bad people and very bad entertainment.
- GenresNonfictionHumorCultural
276 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2021
12 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 26, 2023
A 3.5/5 book
Pros:
•The choices of media etc. to call trash are all top notch. A few familiar choices and a lot of things I was blissfully unaware of. His choices are mostly crass efforts to make money and not sincere mistakes.
• His criticisms never go after people’s’ natural appearances or abilities. He focuses on the ideas, or lack thereof.
• Some parts are very insightful and funny
• Illustrations well-matched
Cons:
• some sections feel padded or have redundancies and feel they were going for a word count when it could have been pruned. This is a natural thing because some trash don’t merit that much attention
• Some wisecracks feel like they weren’t written by an AV Club writer but more an AV Club commenter.
• the homogeneity of the prose style can be a little much
Overall, I couldn’t believe how some of these things exist and loved reading about them (Easy Rider 2 and H8r are ones I may find just to confirm their wretchedness).
Pros:
•The choices of media etc. to call trash are all top notch. A few familiar choices and a lot of things I was blissfully unaware of. His choices are mostly crass efforts to make money and not sincere mistakes.
• His criticisms never go after people’s’ natural appearances or abilities. He focuses on the ideas, or lack thereof.
• Some parts are very insightful and funny
• Illustrations well-matched
Cons:
• some sections feel padded or have redundancies and feel they were going for a word count when it could have been pruned. This is a natural thing because some trash don’t merit that much attention
• Some wisecracks feel like they weren’t written by an AV Club writer but more an AV Club commenter.
• the homogeneity of the prose style can be a little much
Overall, I couldn’t believe how some of these things exist and loved reading about them (Easy Rider 2 and H8r are ones I may find just to confirm their wretchedness).
December 18, 2022
Nathan Rabin is an author whom I follow both on social media and elsewhere online, and in all of my interactions with him he's been not merely funny, but with remarkable insight into what makes a particular piece of pop culture tick. His My Year of Flops project for the Onion's A.V. Club was a fascinating examination on works often reviled in conventional wisdom, not to mention whether they were true garbage or simply misunderstood. The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything does not attempt to find the positive in pop-cultural garbage; rather, it simultaneously celebrates and shines a what-the-hell-were-they-thinking light on the truest dregs of media of the past several decades, from Joan Crawford's My Way of Life to classic Saturday morning cartoons' hectoring anti-drug special, from Steven Seagal's cruddy, culturally-appropriative, bat-guano ultra-MAGA novel (not linking to that dreck, thank you very much) to obscurities like missionary Dale A. Cooper's "A Time To Laugh" album combining fire-and-brimstone Evangelical preaching with so-called "comedic" impressions.
In The Joy of Trash, Rabin is wholly unafraid not merely to point out ill-advised yet boneheaded moves such as Gal Gadot's "Imagine" video at the beginning of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but also to kick truly deserved targets when they're already down—all in his inimitable and gleefully often laugh-out-loud style. I was personally unfamiliar with several of the works profiled in the book, but others—such as the aforementioned anti-drug special, and, for that matter, McGruff the Crime Dog's anti-drug "music" album (one of whose tracks aired ubiquitously as commercials during those in turn aforementioned Saturday morning cartoons)—I was all too aware of, and if Rabin merely trashed them, the book wouldn't've been as good. Rather, because Rabin often offers truly poignant social commentary on the sociopolitical landscape both generally over the past few decades, and specifically of the era of D*nald Tr*mp, The Joy of Trash at least feels like so much more than just a gawking litany of moments of smug Schadenfreude.
When Rabin points out not just how, say, Milo Yiannopoulos' first full-length book fails on a multiplicity of levels, but also why (specifically, insofar as Rabin dissects the editorial notes from Yiannopoulos' obviously frustrated and distressed, yet undoubtedly archconservative, editor in which he tersely notes just how problematic Dangerous was even by the standards of the litany of books by the Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys of the world ), he shows remarkable understanding of several larger issues going on with certain periods of American culture. And when Rabin merely notes how even well-intentioned efforts Don't Work, whether by their being tone-deaf, unwise to begin with, simply laughable, or some combination of the above, Rabin does what he does best as well.
The Joy of Trash is ultimately a just-plain-fun book. And, leaving aside the fact that Nathan Rabin is a friend (or, at least, friend-adjacent), there's something genuinely special about pop-culture criticism that manages to transcend mere review, and cross over into something that offers interesting analysis as well. The Joy of Trash is relatively light reading, but it simultaneously manages to carry real weight.
In The Joy of Trash, Rabin is wholly unafraid not merely to point out ill-advised yet boneheaded moves such as Gal Gadot's "Imagine" video at the beginning of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but also to kick truly deserved targets when they're already down—all in his inimitable and gleefully often laugh-out-loud style. I was personally unfamiliar with several of the works profiled in the book, but others—such as the aforementioned anti-drug special, and, for that matter, McGruff the Crime Dog's anti-drug "music" album (one of whose tracks aired ubiquitously as commercials during those in turn aforementioned Saturday morning cartoons)—I was all too aware of, and if Rabin merely trashed them, the book wouldn't've been as good. Rather, because Rabin often offers truly poignant social commentary on the sociopolitical landscape both generally over the past few decades, and specifically of the era of D*nald Tr*mp, The Joy of Trash at least feels like so much more than just a gawking litany of moments of smug Schadenfreude.
When Rabin points out not just how, say, Milo Yiannopoulos' first full-length book fails on a multiplicity of levels, but also why (specifically, insofar as Rabin dissects the editorial notes from Yiannopoulos' obviously frustrated and distressed, yet undoubtedly archconservative, editor in which he tersely notes just how problematic Dangerous was even by the standards of the litany of books by the Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys of the world ), he shows remarkable understanding of several larger issues going on with certain periods of American culture. And when Rabin merely notes how even well-intentioned efforts Don't Work, whether by their being tone-deaf, unwise to begin with, simply laughable, or some combination of the above, Rabin does what he does best as well.
The Joy of Trash is ultimately a just-plain-fun book. And, leaving aside the fact that Nathan Rabin is a friend (or, at least, friend-adjacent), there's something genuinely special about pop-culture criticism that manages to transcend mere review, and cross over into something that offers interesting analysis as well. The Joy of Trash is relatively light reading, but it simultaneously manages to carry real weight.
January 17, 2022
Very fun.
An excellent entry in what Nabin does best - dig up trash, refine it slightly to make it palatable, and then break down just what makes it so terrible. Carefully selecting the very worst in media and various other forms of failure ("Mike Bloomberg's 2020 Presidential Candidacy" and "Jeremy Renner's App"), he shines in uncovering this dross. Did you know that Joan Crawford was an inveterate anti-feminist? Well, you will now. Unaware of Adrien Brody's decision to dress up as a Rasta Man on SNL to the mutual embarrassment of the cast, the audience in Rockefeller Center, the audience at home, and possibly even himself? Do yourself a favor and get this book.
An excellent entry in what Nabin does best - dig up trash, refine it slightly to make it palatable, and then break down just what makes it so terrible. Carefully selecting the very worst in media and various other forms of failure ("Mike Bloomberg's 2020 Presidential Candidacy" and "Jeremy Renner's App"), he shines in uncovering this dross. Did you know that Joan Crawford was an inveterate anti-feminist? Well, you will now. Unaware of Adrien Brody's decision to dress up as a Rasta Man on SNL to the mutual embarrassment of the cast, the audience in Rockefeller Center, the audience at home, and possibly even himself? Do yourself a favor and get this book.
May 2, 2022
An overall enjoyable read. I heard the author discuss on a pod cast (Reason Interview w/Nick Gillespie), and I always enjoy discussion of maybe not forgettable, but regrettable pop culture nonsense.
One complaint is that the author really wants you to know what his political view are, as quite a few chapters will launch into either a diatribe against a certain political viewpoint/person. I have been dealing with culture writers who's politics I don't agree with for my whole life, but in this cause his vitriol seemed to take away the gist of trash he was trying to discuss.
One complaint is that the author really wants you to know what his political view are, as quite a few chapters will launch into either a diatribe against a certain political viewpoint/person. I have been dealing with culture writers who's politics I don't agree with for my whole life, but in this cause his vitriol seemed to take away the gist of trash he was trying to discuss.
May 30, 2025
Fun stuff -- I hadn't realized how wild the infamous Brady Bunch variety show was, and I hadn't even heard of a lot of these other misbegotten projects. The book is worth it for the two long essays (one for each season) about Baywatch spinoff Baywatch Nights alone (did you know that season 1 was a wannabe grounded private eye show and season 2 was an X-Files riff where the supernatural is real? I sure didn't!).
August 28, 2022
Nathan Rabin continues to be the maestro of writing about bad media. Not closed minded but not forgiving of problematic aspects either he strikes a good tone. I recommend this book and checking out his other works as well.
December 7, 2023
I enjoyed the ride.
July 10, 2023
My contention remains the same: the 80's is always the greatest decade of every century.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews