TERMINAL LAUGHTER

Special to the Columbia Journalism Review

In this whirlywoo world of social networking, blogging, vlogging, Facebooking, Googly mapping, tweeting, twittering, twitting, twatting, and twanging, the role of the critic has been thrown into question. Why, the argument goes, should one bother reading 400 whole words from a film critic like Roger Ebert when that same one can get a nifty 140-character review in literally seconds? As media outlets continue to downsize, those few writers who can eke out a living as critics are asked to do twice as much work for half the money. But against all odds, one critic has managed to harness the possibilities of Internet to serve his critical impulses.

Like so many critics, Craig Whinerose’s beat is poo. A graduate of the journalism program at New York University, Whinerose quickly established a name for himself as one of the top poo critics in America, soon netting bylines in The Village Voice, Spin, Turd Aficionado, Better Bowls and Bowels, Shit! Magazine, American Defecator, Poop Scoop, and Harper’s.

“It was a pretty wild ride to the top,” waxes Whinerose. “The craziest parties, the wildest perks, some of the best bathrooms in the country.” But in 2005, when the Internet got around to do doing that thing that it does where it makes it so writers can’t write anymore, Whinerose was thrown into a crisis.

“I was devastated, broke, barely working at all,” he says. “And worst, I was taking some of the great dumps of my adult life. Creamy poos, corny poos, those great iceberg poos where the poo emerges out of the water: real beautes. A poo critic’s dream.” Then, in 2006, Whinerose heard about the emerging microblogging network Twitter. And then the idea hit him, with the pong of a warm poo to the face.

In August of that year, Whinerose launched “dapooproject,” a Twitter account dedicated to reviewing his own poo-poos. By October, he had over 56,000 followers. It was matter of adaptability. And of discipline. “Whenever I pooped, I’d write about,” says Whinerose. “Some days it’d just be the one poop. Other days it would be two or three. Whatever the case, I made my own mess.”

But despite Twitter’s 140-character constriction, Whinerose was far from constipated. “I was used to penning longer form criticism,” he says. “When I’d freelance for the Voice or some of the nation’s more prestigious shit rags, I’d be writing 2000, sometimes 4000 word essays. On poop, I mean. Odes to poop, poop commentary, careful indexes on the current climate of poop and pooping in American culture. If it came out of your ass and smelled like shit, I was all over it.”

Twitter forced Whinerose to recalibrate many of the inclinations he’d learned at J-school. But great writing, as ever, won out in the long run. Take this delightful little turd from January of 2008: “A solid, tightly-coiled evacuation. Unhurried. Clean break. Wiping like a whisper in the wind.=7.5”

Whinerose’s wit, diligence, and unembarrassed love of poo have paid off. He recently signed a six-figure book deal with Random House, who will republish all of his tweets this fall as Wipe With This Book: Four Years of Da Poo Project. Besides years of Whinerose’s Twitter backlogs, the book will also contain some of his longer-form poo writing, including “Poo or Poop: You Decide” from Rolling Stone (February 2001) and the alarmingly not at all politically-charged Why the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center is a Piece of Shit, originally published in Harper’s (July 2003). It will also contain an appendix of poo pun wisdom which Whinerose has assembled over the years, such as “A turd in the hand is worth poo in the tush,” and other enlightening nuggets.

“Things have really come together, poo-wise,” smiles Whinerose as we walk in stride to the NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute auditorium where he is delivering a commencement address to his alma mater’s graduating class. “But what I’m proudest of, besides all the poo, is that I’ve been able to maintain my critical integrity.”

He’s also been able to beat the odds. In the epoch where the Internet is forcing lesser talents onto the breadline, Whinerose has emerged as one of criticism’s rising stars—a sterling example for anyone looking for a lesson in how to adapt to the climate of the blogosphere. And at the risk of sycophantic fawning, that’s something to shit your pants about.