Anyone who listens to Ira Madison III’s exuberant pop culture podcast, “Keep It!,” knows the writer has a way with words. Whether he’s critiquing a play (he’s a New York University Tisch School of the Arts grad and a Broadway geek) or a Taylor Swift album (he’s also a Swiftie), Madison always brings smart, edgy, hilarious takes. Pure Innocent Fun is a thoroughly enjoyable collection of essays in which Madison reflects on his sometimes-difficult 1990s Milwaukee childhood and the pop culture that shaped him, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Lil’ Kim to Jerry Springer.
Growing up Black and closeted while attending a mostly white, all-boy Catholic high school, Madison learned early how to blend in—or at least try. “I did feel a bit like Clueless’s Dionne, a bougie Black girl played by Stacey Dash who understands the ins and outs of white culture and whose best friend is rich white Beverly Hills teenager Alicia Silverstone’s Cher Horowitz,” he writes.
Raised mostly by his grandmother, Madison struggled with his self-esteem throughout adolescence. A chubby middle schooler, he noticed the unending focus on weight and appearance in pop culture. From Oprah infamously dragging 67 pounds of fat onstage in a wagon to the so-called Subway diet, fat-shaming was everywhere in the 1990s. “Celebrities like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson were called fat even when they were rail-thin,” Madison writes. “Every TV sitcom had a fat-friend character whose only dialogue involved responding to punch lines about their weight.”
Madison found refuge in the movie theater and, later, in his high school and college theater programs. He didn’t end up coming out until college (more accurately, he was outed by a classmate). He recounts this incident and his understandably less-than-magnanimous reaction with heart and candor, hallmarks of this entire essay collection. Pure Innocent Fun is a dizzyingly fun treat for children of the 1990s, pop culture aficionados and really anyone who enjoys hilarious, clear-eyed essays. A superfan of the razor-sharp writings of pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman, Madison shares his idol’s ability to connect pop culture moments to bigger life themes.
