Danny McBride’s Solution to the Masculinity Crisis
Earlier this year, three male writers—Phil Klay, Sean Thor Conroe, and Daniel Lefferts—gathered at the 92nd Street Y to take part in a panel, moderated by the novelist Andrew Lipstein. The topic in question was masculinity in literature. The program promised a “roundtable discussion about masculinity on the edge in American literature,” in which they would discuss “what the crisis in American masculinity means for our culture.” The organizers titled the panel “The Trouble with Men.”
Klay, whose 2014 short-story collection, “Redeployment,” won the National Book Award for Fiction, discussed the positive and negative aspects of being a man in the military and how these collide with civilian life. Conroe, who rose to prominence with his 2022 novel, “Fuccboi,” pointed to modern life’s enforced listlessness, where men have few, if any, positive outlets to embrace the “unconscious urges” of violence and domination and thus are doomed to either internalize them or let them metastasize. Lefferts, who is gay, told the audience that, as a young man, he had found masculinity a repelling force; he offered a counterweight. “The mark of a functioning society is that masculine virtues become less important,” he said. “But if you contrive wars and economic crises and ambient environments of hostility and alarm, those virtues become necessary again.”
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It is unfortunate that Danny McBride, whose début short-story collection, “Thrilling Tales of Modern Men,” came out this summer, wasn’t included in the panel. McBride is best known for creating and starring in the HBO shows “Eastbound & Down” and “The Righteous Gemstones,” both of which feature a male protagonist—played by McBride—who is equal parts chest-thumping buffoon and insecure wimp. Kenny Powers, the antihero of “Eastbound,” is a washed-up, redneck former pro baseball player from North Carolina who returns to his home town as a substitute P.E. teacher—at Jefferson Davis Middle School, naturally—and attempts to get back to the big leagues. In “Gemstones,” McBride plays Jesse Gemstone, the eldest son in an obscenely wealthy South Carolinian televangelist dynasty, who bickers with his feckless siblings about the direction to take their megachurch in the face of competition and scandals.
Powers and Gemstone don’t appear in “Thrilling Tales,” though they wouldn’t be out of place in any of the ten stories. Save for one work entitled “Gerald’s Wife,” which flips between the perspectives of a husband and a wife at a disastrous dinner party, each story is told from the point of view of a man dealing with a different humiliation: the infirmity of old age, psychotic co-workers, baldness.
The protagonists span generations, though McBride focusses on flawed men in their thirties and forties, much as Klay, Lefferts, and Conroe do. But where those authors have attempted to analyze masculinity through solemn, literary means, McBride’s lens is comedy, with a simple thesis: being a man is embarrassing and therefore worth making fun of.
McBride’s stories aren’t misandrist per se, but they do poke fun at male woes, in a way that is neither flippant nor overly serious. “The Institute of Men,” a fable-like story and a standout in the book, is told from the perspective of Mitchie, a balding forty-two-year-old who undergoes an experimental treatment to get his hair and swagger back. The process is marked by varying affronts, but Mitchie presses on, basking in the compliments of co-workers and the attention of a love interest, until it all goes terribly wrong.
Like much of the collection, “Institute” is an “if only” story, in which the protagonist nurses a fatal flaw that prevents him from being fulfilled—if only I were braver (“The Book Burner”), if only I were younger (“Dad’s Way”), if only I wasn’t losing my hair (“Institute”). One is briefly reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story collection, “Men Without Women,” which springs from a single prompt: If only there were no women.
McBride’s focus on male shortcomings is a timely theme, but also one that he’s been exploring for his whole career. In 2023, he told the New York Times that his characters are “all just sort of dudes that I think have subscribed to this antiquated way of what the rules are, like what a dude’s supposed to be.” He went on: “They’ve committed to it, and then the reality of it isn’t adding up to the illusion.”
A strain of envy, in particular, runs through “Thrilling Tales.” In an interview in June, McBride told the Times’ David Marchese that jealousy is “one of those flaws that says so much about someone because it shows what’s important to them and how they look at themselves and feel like they’re not complete.” The darker corners of the internet are all too eager to offer men a compelling list of reasons for why their lives are unfulfilling, as well as an echo chamber full of the similarly aggrieved. McBride, like all good satirists, cranks up the volume of those resentments and insecurities, in the process revealing a new way to see the world. “I like going after human flaws as opposed to the flaws of just this moment. Guilt, shame, feeling inadequate—these things are timeless,” he told the Times.
“Institute” is inventive, taut, and very funny. There are hints of George Saunders in McBride’s ability to turn the indignities of modern life into a gently devastating black comedy. At the beginning of the story, Mitchie, who works at an auto-body shop, is discussing aging with his colleague:
McBride’s experience writing for the screen comes through in the dialogue in “Thrilling Tales.” When his characters are in conversation, the stories hum along, though at times it did feel like I was reading the script for the pilot of a new series starring McBride. In the opening story, “The Illusionist,” a man named Greg is attempting to jump-start a career as a professional magician while in the midst of a divorce. He decides that he’s going to spend thirty days in a glass box suspended in a mall atrium and proudly announces his decision to his family, whom he hopes to impress. It is impossible not to hear McBride’s bouncy Southern drawl in the ensuing dialogue:
McBride was born in south Georgia before eventually moving to Virginia as a child, and many of his stories are set between those two points of the American coastal South. He writes in a sort of thespian-bro argot, spiking locker-room jokes with rococo word choices like a frat-house Faulkner. When Greg explains his plans to become a professional magician to his friends while they’re cruising the marsh in a fishing boat, he gets irritated by a suggestion that he’d be an article of cheap entertainment for children. “No, I won’t be doing kids’ fucking birthday parties. Jesus. I’m doing real magician stuff. Things of spectacle and scope,” he says.
For all the liveliness and color of McBride’s dialogue, some of his narration can be flat. “Growing up, Greg had put a lot of energy into doing magic,” he writes in the otherwise excellent “The Illusionist.” “He performed at his church, and his card tricks were so good that some of the church members complained that it was inappropriate. They thought he was really tapping into some darkness. He’d always had a knack for it.” Greg’s life history jumps to high school in the next paragraph. We never hear anything else about the church or its response to the ungodly card tricks which might have carved a lasting scar on young Greg.
Leaving the gloomy depths of Greg’s childhood unexplored may be for the best. Authors of literary fiction who take on the plight of the modern American male, such as Klay and Conroe, treat it as totalizing in its gravity. To be an average young man, from this perspective, is something inherently dark and sombre, like joining an order of monks who take involuntary vows of celibacy. Serious visions of masculinity seem to be somewhat in vogue, too. David Szalay’s “Flesh” won the 2025 Booker Prize with an affecting, spare vision of one man’s life driven more by inertia than by desire. Tony Tulathimutte’s superb 2024 short-story collection, “Rejection,” was long-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction and has been described as incel lit; the tales lift up the stones that litter Reddit and 4chan to see what night crawlers wriggle there.
It’s not just books, either. Magazines and newspapers have spent much of the past few years filling column inches with concerns about the manhood of young Americans. Last July, the New York Times opinion columnist David French published an essay on the subject that expanded on an interview with the psychologist and bed-making enthusiast Jordan Peterson. “Before, a young man could learn masculinity by osmosis,” French writes. “There wasn’t much confusion about what it meant to be a man. Now, a boy has to learn masculinity intentionally. Young men have to be deliberately taught how to find their place and their masculine identity in a very different world.”
One wonders what “before” French was referring to. In 1990, Sam Allis wrote an essay, in Time, titled “What Do Men Really Want?,” in which he made arguments similar to French’s. “There is profound confusion over what it means to be a man today. Men have faced warping changes in role models since the women’s movement drove the strong, stoic John Wayne-type into the sunset,” he wrote. Forty-two years before that, in 1958, there was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,’s essay “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” in Esquire: “Today men are more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem. The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.” The signs Schlesinger enumerated weren’t far off from the ones pointed out by today’s manosphere podcasters: feminization, collectivism, a general lack of purpose and identity. (But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Schlesinger would have likely been skeptical of red-pill types. “Masculine supremacy, like white supremacy, was the neurosis of an immature society,” he wrote in that same essay.)
McBride’s work as an author and actor injects something refreshing into the discussion. Instead of reinforcing the implicit misogyny of masculine self-pity—men’s plight is someone’s fault, and women are a natural antagonist—he encourages guys to loosen up a bit and even laugh at themselves. He doesn’t think that position is at odds with a modern notion of masculinity; nor is he unsympathetic to listless guys who may be struggling to make sense of their place in the world. McBride once described his characters as “fucked up Don Quixotes” who have delusions of grandeur, and, on a “CBS Morning News” appearance to promote the collection, he called his book a “love letter” to men who “grew up watching ‘Rambo’ and now you work at Geico.” “I think that they find themselves in a point in life where things have not gone to plan, things have not gone as expected, and they’re trying to figure out the tools to put things on track for themselves,” he said.
Schlesinger, in his 1958 essay, presented a three-pronged solution to the crisis of modern masculinity: satire, art, and politics. “Satire means essentially the belief that nothing is sacred—that there is no person or institution or idea which cannot but benefit from the exposure of comedy,” he wrote. Books like McBride’s “Thrilling Tales,” then, might be a solution to the seemingly eternal masculine struggle—or at least a more likely one than endlessly handwringing over men’s troubles in this country, whether writing in magazines or speaking on panels. ♦