Hope you’re doing well.

My name is Alyona. I’m a contemporary artist and researcher, but I’ve also always been into comedy. I’m Russian, but I’ve been living in Germany since the beginning of the war.

I’m currently finishing my (third…) art degree and planning to write my thesis on right- and left-wing humour and comedy’s influence on the political climate in the US, Russia, and maybe Germany. I’ve always thought comedy was a powerful tool for social change/manipulation. Much more powerful than contemporary art, actually.

Your work is a great example of that, but of course it’s also much more. It often feels to me like anthropological research, except that the person conducting it keeps becoming part of the experiment.

I know this is probably the worst possible time to write, given all the attention you’re getting because of YCSE and everything you have going on. I’m really glad you’re finally getting the recognition you’ve always deserved, but I imagine it must be a lot.

It’s crazy how the world has lost its mind over the film. Understandable, though. The whole experience felt to me like a sort of… AI slop, except it was, in fact, REALITY ("reality"?). The film is a very precise indicator of the state we’re in, and somehow intensifies the sense of THE END. I’m thinking of Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence: destruction that unfolds gradually over time rather than as a single dramatic event. The end of the world seems to me less like a single moment we’re waiting for than a process we’re already living through. In a way, the film even feels like a psychedelic trip—or, more precisely, its cathartic peak, when seemingly unrelated concepts collide and annihilate each other.

I also wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done. I’ve been depressed and more or less stuck in my career for the past few years (roughly since the beginning of the war). But what you do is genuinely inspiring and motivating. It shows that you can go far beyond the accepted boundaries/established conventions of your medium, your genre, or your profession. As someone who grew up without any particular privileges and is trying to find something exciting to do with their life while also trying not to end up dead in a ditch, I find it very difficult to think outside the box.

I was also recently diagnosed with ADHD, at almost forty (it’s not a diagnosis that gets much recognition in Russia). So I’ve spent the last few months looking back at my life, things that happened, and my own behaviour from a different angle. I’d always thought of myself as a fairly depressive person who wasn’t genuinely interested in much. Turns out I’d just been trying to get through life on low dopamine.

Although I’m still not sure if I’ve found my own authentic visual language. But, watching The Rehearsal definitely gave me a push to keep looking for it. Btw, people often say that they prefer the second season, but I think the first is really important as an exploration of the social norms governing family relationships. The second season is, of course, about hierarchies, but it doesn’t get under the skin in quite the same way when it comes to personal interactions between people.

I remember when Nathan for You first came out. I think I was more of a CYE and Louie girl back then: more into cynical, depressive observations on everyday life. I didn’t really get your cringe comedy. Only now do I realise how much energy and strength of character it takes to let yourself look like such a complete fool while somehow maintaining a kind of dignity, idk, a certain tenderness for yourself and others.

It’s strange to revisit your earlier work now, with so many more people paying attention to something that once seemed so niche. As if everyone else had got fed up with Hollywood’s emotional engineering too, and had started gravitating toward something almost Brechtian: the wish to see the seams had suddenly found a mass audience, together with so-called New Sincerity (well not exactly new anymore). Brechtian distance and sincerity end up in the same room (s).

But that still leaves a question: what does it mean to make yourself the butt of the joke when you still have the final say in the edit?

Either way, I’m fascinated by this role of the contemporary universal trickster that you’ve found yourself in, both by accident and not by accident at all. By “trickster,” I don’t just mean someone who’s exceptionally good at fucking with everyone. In the myths Lewis Hyde discusses—those of Hermes, Coyote, Eshu—the trickster deceives, breaks taboos, and helps create culture, all at once. He doesn’t stand outside the world to expose its absurdity: he belongs to that absurd world himself and keeps meddling with the way it works.

Maybe what I find so mesmerizing is not that you seem unafraid of looking like a fool. It’s that you’ve made looking like a fool into a complicated, layered method that leaves so much room for interpretation.

And by the way, thank you for looking out for us millennials, too. Over the last few years, I’ve spent far too much time thinking about all the Y2K aesthetics around us, and about watching our cultural references get recycled as fashion while other parts of our lives are dismissed as “millennial cringe.” The feeling that we’re stuck in some weird time loop, with the cultural debris of our childhood—R& B and emo clothes and music—being fed through some strange meat grinder of memory. It’s a strange feeling to watch your own adolescence come back as a period aesthetic while you’re still trying to become a functioning adult. That, too, somehow feels like another sign of the approaching end.

I don’t want to divide people into yet another set of categories, this time by age, and obviously these distinctions are pretty arbitrary. But I hope you get what I mean. I feel like your work draws on a particular kind of expertise in millennial logic: there are things you can only fully grasp if you’ve lived through a particular set of experiences. Yes, I’m talking about Evanescence (my fav moment of the whole show).

A couple more personal things before I go. Thank you for including the conversation with your mom about Palestine and Israel in The Rehearsal. It reminded me of the “conversations” I used to have with my parents about Russia’s war in Ukraine. My mother is Ukrainian, but lived half of her life in Russia and at some point it all became so messy that I stopped talking politics with them altogether.

On a considerably less painful note, I think it’s really cute that your cats keep appearing in your work. I’m not sure what their artistic function is, but as a fellow cat person, seeing them genuinely made me happy.

! The next paragraph is full of spoilers!

Of course, I still have plenty of questions about the film—as I imagine everyone does (possibly including you). But I have to say that the way the scene with Billy in the shower cuts to you seemingly checking out his dick is brilliant. And I still have a question about the size of your dick, whether you actually had a crush on Holmes, or was that a narrative choice you and Lance made for dramatic purposes?

I hope you’re working on something just as crazy (or even crazier) right now. And I wish you all the luck in the world with it.

Best,

A

***

Further reading:

Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. On tricksters as deceivers, boundary-crossers, and cultural inventors, and on what these figures can tell us about artistic practice.

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (ed. and trans. John Willett, 1964). On the alienation effect, and on making the machinery of representation visible so that the audience thinks instead of simply feeling

Mark Lipovetsky, Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Trickster’s Transformation in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture. On figures including Ostap Bender, Buratino, and Stierlitz, and on survival in a contradictory world as a space for creativity, play, and freedom.

Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues.” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (2017): 233–249. On comedy that doesn’t simply relieve anxiety, but produces it—through transgression, displeasure, and the unstable boundary between what is funny and what isn’t.

Lucas Thompson, “Nathan for You and the New Sincerity aesthetic.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 18, no. 4 (2020): 431–451. On how Fielder’s exaggerated manipulation of reality-TV conventions can paradoxically create space for sincere communication and feeling.

Kimberley McLeod, “That Felt Real to Me’: When Reality Theatre and Reality Television Collide.” Theatre Research in Canada 39, no. 2 (2018). A reading of “Smokers Allowed” that brings Nathan for You into conversation with documentary and reality-based theatre.

Max Romanowski and Zachary Sheldon, “Time to Ranch it Up! ’: Ethics and satire in new media.” Critical Studies in Television (2020). On Nathan for You and The Eric Andre Show, and on whether extreme methods strengthen satire’s critical potential or undermine it.

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014). On cultural repetition, the persistence of the past, and the futures that never arrived.