I think David Cross hates me
But we're excited for his show anyway
This piece was written, about New York comic David Cross, for our sister city site The A.V. Club Milwaukee. We'll update it with a link to a review of the show there, one of several on Cross' current tour.
In my career as a professional pop culture critique-meister, I’ve managed to piss off two celebrities. (So long as we define “celebrity” as “cult hero most people have never heard of.”) The first was Steve Albini, an irascible punk rock musician, writer, record producer—sorry, engineer—and man so principled, he agreed to work on a record with grunge-era blockheads Bush only after the band’s record label paid him gobs and gobs of money.
The second celebrity I pissed off was comedian David Cross, who appears Saturday at Riverside Theater. Pissing off Cross—who unlike Albini I actually care about—is an achievement that fills me with a bittersweet mix of pride for having been noticed by one of my heroes and sadness over one of my heroes thinking I'm not a very cool dude.
I got on Albini’s bad side because of a piece I wrote in 2007 for the national A.V. Club site about how MTV once helped pull the music industry out of a horrible economic slump, and how it wouldn’t be able to pull record labels out of this horrible economic slump because the channel (surprise!) no longer plays videos. Apparently Albini took umbrage at my assertion that image is always more important than music when it comes to selling records—which, I don’t know, seems like a thunderously obvious statement to make. But Albini still called me an “idiot” for writing it, and likened me to “date-raping, ’sup bros and the Bush Administration.” Was I insulted? Let me answer that question with another question: Do you think Dolly Parton would be insulted if you called her a flat-chested brunette from Queens? Probably not.
While Albini hated me for an opinion that had nothing to do with him, Cross’ animus was based on a piece I wrote for the A.V. Club blog in 2008 about his much maligned role in Alvin & The Chipmunks. If you care passionately about meaningless bullshit, you probably remember how Cross—a highly respected comedian and actor known for publicly feuding with unabashed hacks like Jim Belushi and Larry The Cable Guy—caught a lot of flak from online wisenheimers for appearing in a terrible-looking kids’ movie. I decided to join the fray only after Cross posted what I felt was a very disingenuous 1,700-word defense of himself on his blog where he claimed, among other things, that it didn’t matter if Alvin was piece of refried animal dung because (1) he only took the job because he hadn’t worked in six months and (2) he needed money to buy a cabin in upstate New York. Also, he doesn’t care what you anonymous dorks think of him anyway.
The main point of my blog was to argue that, in fact, Cross cares very much what people think of him—writing 1,700 words defending yourself is a sure sign of that—and that if he’s going to take a crappy job just for the money, perhaps he shouldn’t get so defensive when fans point out that he’s taking a crappy job just for the money. I thought it was a fairly well reasoned point—I didn’t call him a sellout, I said I was still a fan, I just expressed some misgivings about the smug side of Cross’ public persona.
A week later The New York Observer ran a story about the increasingly ridiculous David Cross-Alvin “controversy” that predictably painted his critics with the usual “hipster asshole comic book guy” brush and, incredibly, compared Cross doing a lousy kiddie film to Dylan going electric. It also gave Cross a forum to go after his faceless tormenters: "It wasn't simply that I read somebody said I was a 'douchebag' for doing this. I read hundreds—literally hundreds [of comments] ... That coupled with the fact that, and this goes to what the guy in the Onion wrote, which was really shit, that I 'wrote this 1,700-word blah-blah-blah,' as if I pored over it through the night with a candle at my side and sent it in to an editor ... I wrote a thing and it took me 20 minutes.”
FYI: The “what the guy in the Onion wrote, which was really shit” part is about me.
Okay, so it’s not like he ranted about me by name. I doubt David Cross even knows my name, or cares to learn my name. But given how rare it is for an actor, musician, or whoever to actually respond directly to something that’s been written about them—at least things I’ve written about them—it kind of blew my mind when I indirectly popped up in an interview with one of my favorite comics, a guy who on any other day of the week I’d probably be gushing about. Knowing Cross had read my little blog post and was irritated was both humbling and stomach-turning.
I’m going to see Cross at the Riverside Theater on Saturday, and I’m planning on reviewing the show. Since I’m a fan, I’m expecting to enjoy myself. But if by some chance I bump into him, I probably won’t mention Alvin & The Chipmunks.
