Funny/Sad Report on Corey Feldman's Birthday Party

A Vice reporter went Corey Feldman's birthday party -- which Feldman charged men $250 for the privilege of attending, though women and/or prostitutes could attend for free if they agreed to walk around in stripper lingerie for the entire night -- and was permitted to report on it, on the condition that Corey Feldman would have the power of final edit over the article.

No reporter should ever agree to let his subject edit his work, of course. But offered the opportunity to peek behind the scarlet curtains of the "Feldmansion" (as Feldman decrees his stately pleasure dome*), one can understand if the pillars holding up journalistic ethics might buckle and break beneath the pressure of Awesome.

Long story short: The reporter called Corey Feldman a total SadDouche. He did this by sarcasm. Instead of calling Feldman's party sad, weird, weird, and sad, he called it "f***ing awesome" with a little too much gusto.

So much gusto, in fact, that no one could possibly miss his intent to convey the opposite impression... No one, that is, except Corey Feldman himself, who seems to have been absent the day they taught "Come On, Dude!" in "Come On, Dude!" school.

Of all the sad parts of the short article, the piece's saddest passage is this one:

DISCLAIMER: I was only allowed to attend Corey's birthday party under the condition that he have final edit of whatever I write. Below is the text approved by Corey Feldman

It's funny, weird, sad, and cruel. So read it if you want to read about the sad world of Corey Feldman, and also the dickish, abusive world of reporters who are sometimes smarter than their subjects and can thus exploit that inequality for purposes of communal humiliations.**

Content warning for lots of pictures of women in stripperish lingerie pretending to be excited to be at Corey Feldman's Feldmansion.

Corey Feldman has by now reacted angrily to the piece whose text he approved, accusing himself of slander and threatening to sue himself for defamation.

Actually, given the fact he blessed the text, he has shifted his anger to the "horrid pictures," which he claims were carefully culled in order to make an aging child star surrounded by strippers and charging his "friends" for admission appear to be pathetic. But I think in reality he's mad that he didn't catch the sarcastic tone of the piece, and he can't say "You tricked me and it wasn't even that hard to do!" because admitting that would be the final humiliation.

"Top o' the world, ma!
Top o' the world!"

* Caveat: It's not a dome, does not appear stately, and the "pleasure" seems to come chiefly in the form of surprise Celebrity Guests such as DJs no one's ever heard of. And Ron Jeremy. Who I believe I once read will literally go anywhere he's invited if there is free food. (I really think I read that.)

** Not really a shot at this guy-- I would have done the same thing. In fact, I imitated his jokes in this post.

But that's sort of why I feel the pangs of shabbiness here -- because I personally would have enlisted myself into the cruelty and I don't think I would have let my conscience trouble me too much about it.

What the reporter did to Corey Feldman was unwarranted and mean and also just what I would have done, too.

At the end of the day, the dirty little open secret about humor is that an awful lot of it is grounded in cruelty and humiliation.

posted by Ace at 02:15 PM

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