I am awake because everything is hilarious. And also terrifying. And also embarrassing.
Don’t pick up the phone, I tell myself as I lie in bed on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, 2016. Go to sleep, my brain hisses, as I slip my hand out from beneath the sheet and unlock my phone. I open the Notes app and my bedroom is suddenly illuminated by garish, gray-blue light, like I’m in a reboot of Poltergeist. Well, I think to myself, it’s not like I have a choice now. I hitch myself up in bed and start to type. There is a joke emergency.
I don’t realize it at the time, but I am entering a season of sleepless nights. It’s the middle of July and I am three weeks into my new job as a person who contributes to this great democracy by making fun of politics online for money. It’s immensely enjoyable but it does have the strange side effect of forcing me to know more about what’s happening in the world, particularly in the political world, and as I said, that’s hilarious and terrifying and deeply embarrassing. So, perfect for the internet. I’ve never been a particularly internet-y person. I like a good meme like the rest of the youths, but I’m never on the cutting edge of internet culture. Though I’ve had a couple of lackluster blogs, I’ve never been a blogger. I read television recaps on the legendary site Television Without Pity for years but never commented or engaged in any meaningful way beyond wishing that they’d miraculously email me and ask me to join the team. I must admit I know what Tumblr is but every time I think I know how to search for something on it I am proven wrong. I am a consumer on the internet, a regular, a normal. And, suddenly, recently, a viral creator. Clearly, the internet is broken.
Four weeks earlier, I’d come across a photo of President Obama, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto grinning as they strode down a red-carpeted walkway in bespoke suits. I was immediately deeply shewk. So I told the internet about it. I fired up my aging computer, posted the shot on Facebook, and wrote, “Whoever took this photo deserves a GD Pulitzer Prize. We may be two minutes from doomsday but thank the Lord we still live in a universe where three world leaders can strut into a room like they’re the new interracial male cast of Sex and the City. Like I have ALREADY pre-purchased tickets to this film. Out here in these streets looking like Career Day Ken. Looking like Destiny’s DILF. Looking like the Alternate Universe version of our Current Political Universe. Looking like Tom Ford presents The Avengers.” It went on like that for a while. As I said, I was deeply shewk.
At this time, I had about 1,500 Facebook friends, almost exclusively people I’d actually met. I had, on occasion, posted something funny online that friends shared with their friends who shared with their friends, eventually giving whatever I’d written a temporary social lift. That’s how the internet works, and the first time it happened on Facebook—when my blog post about how expensive Beyoncé concert tickets were got 100,000 page views—I thought I was famous. The internet will quickly remind you that you are not famous; you just did this one thing this one time and that was yesterday so why are we still talking about it?
The world leaders photo was different, though. My crazed-thirst rant about the president and his hot friends zigzagged across the internet with a speed that shocked me. It was liked 77,000 times, generated almost 6,000 comments (some of them not terrible!), and was shared 17,000 times. The great aggregation machine of the internet whirred to life and articles started popping up with headlines like “Internet User Has Hilarious Reaction to Obama Photo.” I was an Internet User! People started friending me on Facebook by the hundreds—strangers! And, a few days after the post, Leah Chernikoff, the site director of ELLE.com, sent me a Facebook message. “I saw your post shared by so many acquaintances. Would you consider doing more of this kind of writing?” she wrote.
That message, to which I responded with a level of overzealous exuberance that still sends shivers of embarrassment down my spine, would lead to a daily freelance humor column, called Eric Reads the News, and, later, a full-time, salaried position at ELLE.com. It would also eventually bring me to the attention of editors at The New York Times, provoke theater makers to express interest in reading my plays, and pave the way for this book. Publicly thirsting after a sitting president would, it turns out, change my life.
“My husband was called to his profession by God,” I would later tell people at parties or mumble to my houseplants. “I was called to my profession by a very accomplished woman in Manhattan.”
I should be asleep. It is the responsible thing to do. Although I am writing the daily column—for three weeks now!—on ELLE.com, I am also holding down a day job as a program director at an LGBTQ community center. Every day, I wake a few hours early, chat with Leah on Facebook Messenger about what’s happening in the news, decide on something to write about, and attempt to fire it off before running to the center. Sometimes that actually works. Other times, I am squeezing writing into my lunch breaks or carving out a quiet half hour in which I can type madly into my phone before jumping back into my day. I have never freelanced at this level before—I’ve written a couple of hyperbole-filled concert reviews for Philadelphia Magazine (“Ms. Ross’s third costume change was into a king-size periwinkle duvet cover”), but those were the kinds of things I could dash off on a Saturday morning at a coffee shop, or spend an evening after work on.
This column is a whole different animal. It feels like the already lightning-fast news cycle is speeding up. The presidential campaign is kicking into high gear now that, improbably, C-list grifter Donald Trump has made an ascent in the Republican Party and it seems clear that Hillary Clinton will not face any obstruction to her nomination in a few days from Bernie Sanders. We are in a moment where the news is, blessedly, fairly predictable, which makes it easier to make fun of. But I find that you have to be quick about it. If something happened last night, you have until maybe midday to write about it. Otherwise, the world—and the internet—will have moved on. As a spectator on the internet, someone who lives in Philadelphia and whose only understanding of the New York fashion media world of which the column is tangentially a part comes from The Devil Wears Prada, I understand the speed and the drive but I don’t really know what to do with it yet.
I am still trying to figure out what this column is, and if it will continue past, say, tomorrow. I am convinced that everyone will realize they have made a mistake in giving me money to make jokes. I am writing summaries of happenings or “reads” of newsworthy photos that, I hope, have the tone of a late night comedy monologue screamed through a bullhorn by a very excited gay black person. There are moments when I wonder if this is problematic—the audience I’m writing for is largely straight-identified, so my use of my communities’ vernaculars might read as a performance rather than a genuine expression. But this is how I was writing before—Diana’s duvet ain’t gonna describe itself, honey—and that writing was for my friends. Even the Obama thirst was, ostensibly, for people who knew me, a little note dashed off to a small community that also happens to be the entire internet. So when I wonder about the column and the hyperbole I find works well for it, I have to ask if everything about myself is minstrelsy and whether there is any part of me that actually exists in reality, and I don’t have time to sort through that. I am an Internet User and I am trying my best!
I have to get this column up and get to work. Which is why I should be asleep. I can’t be burning the midnight oil when I need to wake up in three hours, figure out what to say about the Democratic National Convention or Jeff Goldblum’s hair or Idris Elba’s absolutely everything, and then hop on the subway to my job where I am trying to make community for LGBTQ people. In reality.
I scan the darkened bedroom—the window with a view of the South Philly stadium where the convention is currently being held, the two copies of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up that I keep meaning to read, the armchair that I bought from a thrift store because it was on sale but that I will never sit in because I am afraid it is haunted, and my phone, now in my hand, waiting.
Don’t do it, I tell myself. Close your eyes, go to sleep, wake up, show up to work on time for once in your life, do a good job, answer all of your unread emails, donate to charity, vote, care about the world, raise a good kid or a dog (tbd), yell at fewer strangers on Facebook, smile more (unless someone on the street tells you to, in which case don’t smile), have hope (shoutout to Barack!) but also be realistic about what you can expect out of this life (shoutout to systemic oppression!), figure out what a realistic expectation for hope in this life is, be a better person, die eventually.
You know, the usual.
I have a joke that I want to jot down for the next day’s column, but I am resisting (or should I say, I am #Resisting. A few months early). If I start writing, I’ll have to admit I’m awake, and then I’ll want to keep writing and probably tweeting, and then I’ll check the news, and then I will never get to sleep and I will be either grumpy or late to work (survey says: both!), which will lead to me not responding to emails or being a better person or building a community or figuring out what I’m supposed to be doing in this life.
And what is the benefit if I do write it down? The best thing that can happen: Everyone laughs. That’s the point, right? It’s a humor column on the internet in the days before nothing was ever funny again. When the jokes work, people like them and share them and it feels for a moment like all of the internet laughs. Positive internet attention is the best thing that can happen in this scenario.
The worst thing: No one laughs. Public scorn. Being canceled. And also lateness, not being a better person, eventual death, etc. The over-under isn’t great.
I am aware that this is not the way anything is supposed to work. The job, the opportunity, the positive attention. It feels unearned, even though I am in my mid-thirties and it’s not like I haven’t been unsuccessfully writing things—some of them funny—for years. But the thing about success is that it doesn’t seem like a natural result of unsuccessfulness. It feels like success comes despite a lack of success. Or, if you achieve some level of success, your lack of success in the past should be retrofitted as stepping-stones along the path of your rise. And that’s true and not true. Did I have a plan? No. Did it work out? Seems like it. It’s easy for me to see the blind luck at play and hard for me to see the parts of me that put in the work. On top of that, writing the column is fun, and as someone who has started many games of Monopoly and finished zero, I know that capitalism is not supposed to be fun.
Though I do have a constant hum of low-level anxiety about organizing my time, and producing a punchline, and keeping this gig, I still feel like I should be struggling more. Remember how Carrie Bradshaw got drunk at lunch every day and stayed out till four in the morning on dates, and wrote just one weekly column but was still on the side of a bus? I’m not on a bus and I write every day, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I’ve put enough effort in to deserve this.
Deserving anything related to money is a fraught concept for me, particularly when it comes to art. If you’re pursuing some kind of artistic product—and I think of writing as art—then you’re doing what you love, and your labor is one of love. So, money is good, and money is necessary, and money is that thing that tells you that what you’re doing is not a fool’s errand. But the money is also an albatross, changing your relationship to the art. It’s like writing a random joke for a couple hundred people you’ve met throughout your life and then suddenly having thousands of people you don’t know respond. It is not bad, but it is hard to navigate. Who am I doing this for and do they want what I want?
The Notes app is a blank slate that celebrities use to apologize publicly and which I use to shape the random asides in my brain into textual non sequiturs I hope to understand in the morning. On the night of the 2016 DNC, I write, “Michelle Obama is Usain Bolt–ing her way out of that White House,” referencing the intended effect of the First Lady’s powerful speech at the DNC hours earlier. You know the one. “I wake up every morning in a house built by slaves.” The one that I can’t even think about without automatically giving praise hands and letting out a low hum, church-style. The Declaration of Independence, remixed. That one.
I am lying awake filled with inspiration and a little bit of heartsickness and that good ole American low-level rage as I replay Mrs. Obama’s words, which convey both a fervent love for this country and a soul-shaking desire for it to be less terrible. And I am doing the thing that I do with things that I love, or am frustrated by, or don’t understand, or am infuriated by: I am making jokes.
Mrs. Obama is, rightfully I think, totally over the ugly presidential campaign and probably the presidency in general, but has been doing everything in her power to ensure that the next president is someone who will carry on her husband’s legacy of, at best, hope, and at worst, less terribleness. She has lip-synced for the country’s life and, hours later, I am still thinking about it. I will probably think about it forever. It feels, to me, consequential. Life-changing. Even though it is, ultimately, a campaign speech at a political pageant. It’s theater. The only way it could preach to the choir more is if there were an actual choir (suggestion for next time). And of course, it doesn’t end up winning her chosen candidate the election. So, what is the consequence, really? Or rather, who was she doing it for? I guess I believe she was doing it for me. For her. For the future.
In the moment, that’s enough. I don’t know if anyone is actually tracking the movement of the moral universe, but I’d wager that bend is a lot longer than any of us can bear. This is not to suggest that Dr. King’s famous quote is wrong. Rather, justice may be a lot farther than we think. I’m a Bend Truther.
And yet, we get out of bed, sometimes we give speeches, we have kids and/or dogs, we take those kid-dogs to Washington, DC, and we show them that place in stone where it says the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice as if that’s something they’ll see in their lifetime. Why? Hope. That’s the only thing I can come up with. We must all, even in some small way, be angling toward hope. And who am I to joke about that? Michelle Obama is trying to change the course of history and I’m making quips online. Who is this for? And what does it add?
The comedic surprise I’m always trying to get to in the column is hope. A joke is built on a surprise. You might anticipate a punchline, you might see it coming from a mile away, but if you laugh it’s because there is some part of you that is surprised. I find that interesting because comedy is also made up of formulas. Jokes have structure and those structures have been in place for years. They’re probably hardwired into our brains or the way language is organized. The structures evolve and shift, of course, but the basic arithmetic of what makes us laugh remains the same. That’s the reason “Who’s On First?” still works and that’s the reason the latest meme works. That’s, really, the reason memes exist at all. Memes are open-source joke structure. A meme shows you how the joke works and then invites you to fill in your own details. Comedy on the internet, like everything else on the internet, can be democratic. But, because it’s comedy and because it’s the internet, it can also be a fucking trash fire.
My goal is not to add trash to the fire. I know it’s not a given, but I realized early on in the writing that the thing that interested me most was not punching down on the world that seemed to be sinking ever faster, but rather punching up to an idea of what we could be. I’m aware I’m not writing a motivational column for O, the Oprah Magazine (hello, Oprah, I am available whenever you need me), but it seems to me if I’m going to try to make people laugh on the internet, maybe it should also make them happy. Like the original viral Facebook post said, “We may be two minutes from doomsday but…”
Okay. Back to bed. No time to search the darkness for the bend in the moral universe tonight. I turn my phone off. I pause. And then pick my phone up again. Another thought about Mrs. Obama:
“You ever seen someone work this hard to leave a job?”
Now I’m done. Phone off, head on pillow, deep breathing, better life, etc.
My eyes spring open again as if my eyelids are like “Child, who you think you foolin’?” I grab the phone. “On her way to the convention, Michelle stopped by Independence Hall and snatched all of the Founding Fathers bald. And then she rang the Liberty Bell, just because.”
I turn on the bedside lamp and get comfortable. If I’m doing this, I might as well be able to see. Plus, the light keeps that haunted-ass chair in its place. At work the next day, I will explain my sleepiness by muttering, “Sorry. I was up late. Got called into a jokes emergency online. Michelle Obama is Shawshanking through the walls of the Oval Office.”
I don’t exactly know what I’m doing. Or why. (Put that on my tombstone: Here lies R. Eric; he didn’t exactly know what he was doing.)
Nevertheless, I’m trying it.
(Correction: please put that on my tombstone. Here lies R. Eric. He tried it.)