The Joy of Trash

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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 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.