John Campbell's Joke is Still Fucked Up

i do not know whats worse

you have to take responsability for the effect of your words and actions, even if it was a prank or a social experiment, even if the people that got upset didnt “got it”.. How hard is that to grasp, maybe if so many people got upset by it, maybe perhaps it was because of a good reason.

i’m sorry, the john campbell thing is the stupidest thing i’ve ever seen on tumblr.

I feel so Tumblr for not understanding that the John Campbell thing was a joke

Campbell seems to me like he’s in pain and in that pain has failed to account for the pain of others.  He forgot that his kind of subject—a white, male, cis, (straight?) subject is not the only kind of subject that has to deal with depression.  Other people get depressed, and we are very used to hearing, “Your illness does not exist” coming out of a body like Campbell’s.

So, to sum up:  for me there’s a political failure here, but it’s a complicated one.  The personal failure, on the other hand, is simple: he made bad art.

what is actually saddening and disheartening in all this is how many people seem eager to believe acting depressed is a real way to earn money and gain popularity

2. Artist explains that essay is satirical and they use writing as a method of dealing with their depression.

Since you seem to have some time to kill, read this post about how badly he fails at effective satire, since that was allegedly his aim.

doing something fucked up & then calling it “art” does none of the following

• make it art
• make it interesting
• absolve the creator of responsibility for the fucked-up thing they’ve done
• add relevance to the piece

and then a bunch of the people who did get that it’s satire are SO PROUD OF THEMSELVES thinking it means they’re smart that they feel the need to go around heaping ridiculously excessive praise on the bad satire calling it “BRILLIANT” and “GENIUS” and making laughably smug comparisons to jonathan swift

so basically what we have here is a watery, sprawling attempt at humor that misses all the notes that would make it effective or productive and instead just brazenly stabs at the real experiences of real people with real depression. if you’re going to write ‘offensive’ humor it actually has to be funny and insightful to be worth it. 

I read his “apology” thing and… Look, I say with some confidence, being a lover of dry humour and fond of mostly British comedy (which is vastly different from American comedy in many ways and more nitpickish than Canadian comedy which is mainly self-deprecating) I can say with some confidence that I understand satire. I understand different methods of satire and the complexities of it over simpler humour. I can understand and appreciate it.

if no one understands your satire and it hurts them because they are used to people in your demographic/who have privileges that you do telling them that they’re not really depressed and mental illnesses are not real (wOAH WHAT IF THAT IS WHY THEY DON’T GET THE JOKE DOES THAT BLOW YOUR MIND)

Words cannot expressed how embarrassed I’ve felt today falling for such a publicity stunt.

Through all of this, I was always able to see a more “positive” side of things. I have always been able to think optimistically in a way that sometimes surprises even myself. “Positive thinking” wasn’t able to alter my mood, though. “Happy thoughts” just don’t have the ability to change a person’s brain chemistry, and that is what I needed to happen.

shut the fuck up, john campbell

You have every right to make whatever jokes or satirical commentary or art that you want. But I, in turn, can tell you to fuck off if I take issue with it. 

If he was truly sorry, he would have flat-out apologized for what he did, none of this “I’m sorry that you” bullshit, and retract his statements. The least he could’ve done was say “I wasn’t thinking straight.” but he can’t even do that.

#john campbell #bad attempts at satire

the more I research Campbell the less I expect the apology. He has a “persona” that refuses the real. His life is an exhausting performance. That’s his choice, but it’s the choice of his fans and fans of those fans that choose to hold this against him.

As someone who has turned to the arts time and again to help with my own feelings and issues—and who wants to make a career out of using art in a therapeutic manner to help people work through their own issues—I honestly just feel disgusted with this whole affair.

all I can say is that a lot of the people I saw responding to him last night were long-time fans of his comic, and/or the usually very skeptical, and/or the usually very calm, and I think that’s evidence that it wasn’t as simple as it would naturally seem to you.

you either don’t know how to read english or are just too lazy to do so carefully enough to not TWIST SOMEONE’S MESSAGE INTO LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY ARE SAYING

your updates are depressing me

If only for a day or two, it was not presented as art, it was presented as truth. And to make people that love your work and support you feel terrible, and then excuse it in the name of “performance art” without an apology, is an absolute dick move.

If I saw that my friend had made a ‘joking’ list of people who were faking depression, and I was on it? That person would not be my fucking friend any more.

behold, john campbell is obviously making some kind of (albeit unfunny) satire/social commentary/whatever, and is implicating tumblr’s favorite writers/artists/entertainers solely to provoke a reaction of blind tumblry fury.

The fact that John Campbell now realizes that a huge chunk of the people who read his comic don’t understand satire have probably made him spiral further into his real, not-made-up depression.

I think the reason I’m just not mad at John Campbell is that well, he never really fooled me.

John Campbell was on the brink of national and international fame when he died of a heart attack in 1993. If you were lucky enough to see him live, then you were privileged to see an intense, talented, and tortured man howl at the dark forces of the night.

This is a man who’s suffered from near catatonia. He understands you. This is a bleak, depressed joke. You can laugh at it, but you don’t have to. It’s the kind of laughter that emerges because you want to fill the hole left by dread and despair.

So: it’s not “venting”.  He’s not using satire as a survival mechanism.   He’s deliberately creating a shitstorm around these issues and he’s doing it in order to draw attention to himself.  He’s acting out.

just because you’re in a bad place doesnt mean you are forgiven for being an asshole

I dislike the way his “satire” is getting defended and I’m feeling more on the side of those who were offended/hurt by what he’s done or said. To this day I have no idea what his kickstarter was about or if he really did steal from people or if that was a gag too.

apparently John Campbell said that the blog post that started this whole controversy in the first place was meant to be a “joke” and “satire,” and he and his friends are making fun of people who “didn’t get it.”

…Admittedly it’s pretty foolish of Mr. Campbell to be so massively sarcastic on the internet, where everything is serious business…but that’s assuming he even cares. I’m not so sure he does.

gonna withhold judgement in general until i learn HOW LONG AGO they apparently faked depression because I’ve done/said shit in the past I’m not proud of, etc

I just hope he likes losing most of his fanbase and people buying his shit wanting return addresses

okay i dont even

i am so lost at this point 

like i’m still mad???

but mostly i’m just confused and john campbell you need to stop

John Campbell emailed me May 27, 2010 at 5:25PM: 

TAO LIN IS NOT A REAL PERSON

Tao Lin was made up in 1994 by a man named Stephen Myers.

Stephen told his wife he had another son and a second family, which was a lie. He said his boy was “very Asian” and had therefore adopted the surname of his “Asian wife.” (fabricated)

This “Asian wife and family” Stephen believed to be the best way for him to extract himself from his current family to live on his own and spend his free time masturbating.

Later Tao Lin “went to school” at a college where Stephen Myers frequented the university library to touch the feet of women studying there. When questioned by campus security about his presence, he would state that he was visiting his “son” Tao Lin.

Having exhausted his (real) children’s college funds in pursuit of his goals (unemployment, masturbation), Stephen was forced to leave his unemployment and soon began working at an independent publishing house in New York City.

As a temporary employee, he spent the majority of his time masturbating in either a rarely-used bathroom or an unoccupied office which during certain times of the day had what Stephen considered “the perfect temperature and humidity.”

Tao Lin “submitted” to this same publishing house when an intern discovered “letters” from one “Tao Lin” in this unoccupied office. The fabrication of these letters had become a central conceit of Stephen Myers' masturbation rituals.

Stephen was asked for and submitted several more letters on behalf of his “son” before admitting to the non-existence of “Tao Lin” and the origin of his letters. The publishing house continues to distribute the work of “Tao Lin.”