4 Celebrities Who Got Blacklisted for Doing the Right Thing

What changed? Well, if you give it a listen, you'll note that most of my points in that entry come from the conversation I had with John Cheese on the podcast that accompanied the column. He made such a strong case for why wrestling isn't as silly as it seems that it completely changed what I wrote.

The same thing happened with the podcast this week. Don't worry, I won't hide it this time, you can listen to it right here.

I'm joined by a bunch of super duper guests, including the likes of David Huntsberger, expert comic and host of an amazing podcast called Professor Blastoff, and Jeff May, a comic who enjoys hockey.

More importantly for the topic at hand, though, is the third guest, Brian Dunkleman.

Brian Dunkleman is a name that pops up on "Where are they now?" lists on a regular basis. He was the co-host of American Idol for one season before famously quitting to pursue a career in disappearing from the general public's memory.

I've had the pleasure of getting to know him by way of the stand-up comedy show I host, which he's appeared on several times. When I first planned this column, my intention was to make it a sequel to that column I mentioned earlier about organizations that get more hate than they deserve.

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Turns out they totally deserve it!

I wasn't going to defend American Idol, really. It was more about the contestants and the theory that appearing on the show gives you an unfair leg up in the music business. We actually talk about that a bit on the podcast, but in the course of talking to Brian Dunkleman, it became fairly obvious that the column shouldn't be about defending the contestants; it should be about defending him (and three to four more people, because this is Cracked and lists fuel our engine).

Here's the thing: In the annals of pop culture history, Brian Dunkleman's decision to quit American Idol is cited as a totally self-inflicted Pete Best situation.

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Ha! Pete Best, am I right, kids?!?!?

Whereas Best was jettisoned from the Beatles by force right before the band got huge, Dunkleman left by choice at the exact same moment in the trajectory of American Idol history. It's generally accepted that he left because he thought the show was going nowhere and that it was the right move for his career, a decision that, in hindsight, seems completely insane.

Of course, there are two sides to every story, and the Dunkleman side of this one makes it clear that, no matter the financial ramifications, leaving was at the very least the right decision from a mental health standpoint. Until we recorded the podcast, I'd never actually asked about the American Idol stuff. I expected to hear tales of woe about leaving a gig that could have set him up for life when the situation, in retrospect, really wasn't that bad. What I got instead was a series of harrowing stories about a year spent working for what must be one of the worst employers on television and with the worst co-worker imaginable.

Jason Merritt/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
This guy!

That, of course, is Ryan Seacrest, and his alleged failings as a co-worker and as a person in general, as told to me by Brian Dunkleman, are too numerous to comprehensively list here. My favorite horror story, though, involves Seacrest repeatedly and intentionally failing to read lines written for him on the teleprompter. These lines were intended to set up the lines that Dunkleman would deliver next, thus giving the impression that Dunkleman was the one fucking up, and he did it solely for the "entertainment" value of it all. It happened four times in one episode alone, and apparently shenanigans like this were standard operating procedure for Seacrest.

Shockingly, though, aside from the part where he's haunted him ever since, it seems like Ryan Seacrest probably wasn't even the worst part of Dunkleman's year in reality singing competition hell. That title would be reserved for show producer Nigel Lythgoe.

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This guy is a dick? No way.

He's the subject of a particularly depressing story that involves reprimanding the hosts for not doing enough to make a contestant feel worse after Simon Cowell had just trashed his performance. This happened in the very first episode, mind you.

Lythgoe was apparently also the man responsible for writing scripts so terrifyingly cheesy that Dunkleman eventually resorted to paying (out of his own pocket) other comics like Doug Benson to write jokes that he would go off script to sneak into the broadcasts. Seriously, though, how bad could the jokes he was supposed to deliver really have been? Glad you asked, here's an example:

Seacrest: "Our contestants are gonna be famous now, they'll have to learn how to deal with the paparazzi."

Dunkleman: "Yeah, that stuff can really repeat on you, but a pizza's just not the same without it!"

Seacrest: "Paparazzi, not pepperoni! Get with it man!"

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Comedy!

If you laughed at that, you're the answer to every "Who is buying this shit?" question ever. Money is great, but when you're trying to build a career in comedy, letting someone put jokes like those in your mouth can destroy your momentum pretty quickly. So, Brian Dunkleman had to decide whether the money he stood to make from sticking around was worth doing work he hated under terrible conditions. He decided it wasn't.

What came from that decision speaks directly to the point I wanted to make when I decided to write about the show in the first place. American Idol is regularly dismissed as a cheap and easy way for someone to "win" a career in music. Is it, though? For one thing, you don't win a career; you win the opportunity to release one album. Music history is littered with countless acts who had one shot to release an album and made nothing else of it, and the majority of them didn't have the stigma of being a "contest winner" who hasn't paid enough dues to be earning a living playing music. Carrying that burden just makes your chances of succeeding all the more slim. For every Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood who managed to actually develop a successful music career, there are twice as many Taylor Hickses and David Cooks we'll most likely never hear from again.

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Taylor Hicks: The Steve Martin of being forgotten by everyone.

Unfortunately, that same stink has been following Brian Dunkleman's career prospects around for over a decade now. He didn't get on the show by waiting in line for eight hours at the Superdome hoping to tell jokes to Paula Abdul; he was just the co-host for a season. Nevertheless, that brief stint on the show has somehow landed him in the same category as the Bucky Covingtons of the world in the eyes of a lot of people, even though he was quite possibly the first person to publicly call bullshit on what the show was about.

So, that's the story of how this column came to be about public figures who tried to do the right thing and got burned for it. Now let's talk baseball.

Still, this is America's pastime we're talking about, and those freakish growth spurts just happened to coincide with a home run race that reignited interest in a game that a lot of people had rightly written off after a series of labor disputes made everyone in the league look like an entitled twat.

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Reminder: Jose Canseco is a New York Times best-selling author.

So, when former home run machine and forever crazy machine Jose Canseco released a book in 2005 called Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big, his allegations of epidemic-level steroid abuse in baseball was mostly written off as another attention-grabbing stunt by a washed up athlete who sorely missed life in the spotlight.

If any baseball purists have conveniently forgotten that, here's a quote from Canseco's former manager, Tony LaRussa, in regard to Canseco's allegations:

"First of all, I think he's in dire straits and needs money. ... I think there's a healthy case of envy and jealousy."

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Good luck staying mad at him with that backdrop behind him.

While that might have been partially true, it didn't change the fact that Canseco was telling the truth. Time and an absurd series of congressional hearings would eventually prove that, indeed, scores of MLB players, including several of the biggest names in the game, had been using steroids for a long time.

Still, no one likes a tattle-tale. That's as true in baseball as it is anywhere else, and Canseco's reputation has never fully recovered from falling on the wrong side of that life rule. You can hate him for that all you want, but at least he was the first of that now reviled group of athletes to come clean about what had become of baseball.

He's still pretty fucking crazy, though.

There's an odd dynamic between country music and authority. On the one hand, country musicians have long prided themselves on being the kind of people who take no shit from no one in any situation, so rejecting authority is almost always looked upon favorably. That said, country musicians, historically, are a fiercely patriotic bunch. So it's more like questioning authority is usually fine, but questioning authority that actually matters for anything is a no-no.

The best example of the country music community ostracizing one of their own for doing exactly what the "rebels" who founded the genre would have you believe is exactly their kind of misbehavin' was Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks. She had the audacity to tell an audience in England that she was ashamed to be from the same state as then president George W. Bush.

This was at the height of Bushmania in the United States, a term I just made up to describe that period of time when criticizing the war in Iraq (or the actions of the Bush administration in any capacity, really) was enough to get you labeled a traitor on the conservative talk show circuit.

It was way worse than that with Natalie Maines, though. She wasn't just called names; her band, at least for a while, was completely eradicated from country radio. Fans gathered around in protest to burn Dixie Chicks merchandise and run steamrollers over piles of their music.

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Except for these hippies, apparently.

A concert tour that was expected to be one of the biggest of the year devolved into a series of cancellations and angry protests from people swept up in that special kind of crazy that only blind faith can cause. Suddenly, country musicians weren't supposed to be outspoken outlaws, they were supposed to "shut up and sing," while Bill O'Reilly and company were designated the sole beneficiaries of the right to talk shit about the government.

Basically, it was country music turning on a country musician for doing what country musicians are supposed to do, and it worked really damn well. The Dixie Chicks did manage to regroup and record another Grammy-winning album in the wake of the fiasco, but apparently, when they titled the lead single "Not Ready to Make Nice," they meant it, because they haven't been seen since.

That player is Chris Kluwe. Up until 2012, he was a punter for the Minnesota Vikings. He also happens to be an outspoken supporter of gay marriage rights, which probably explains why he's now a retired NFL punter at the relatively young age (especially for a kicker) of 32. In fact, if you ask Kluwe, there's no probably about it. He wrote an article about the matter for Deadspin under the cryptic headline "I Was an NFL Player Until I Was Fired by Two Cowards and a Bigot."

Deadspin
Meaning what, exactly?

In that article, Kluwe ran through a laundry list of uncomfortable exchanges and interactions between himself and the Minnesota Vikings coaching staff over his support for same-sex marriage. At the time, he was in his eighth season as an NFL player. By the time that season ended, his career was over. The Vikings cut ties with Kluwe at the end of 2012, and his subsequent tryouts with other teams failed to yield a contract offer.

There's a good chance that all of Kluwe's outspokenness, at least in the short term, won't go too far in making things more comfortable for Michael Sam as he prepares to (hopefully) play for an NFL team, but he does have one act to his credit that seems to have been the catalyst for righting a longstanding wrong. As one of his last acts of defiance, during a December 2012 game against the Chicago Bears, Kluwe covered the Hall of Fame patch on his jersey with a Post-It note that said "Vote Ray Guy."

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Pictured above somewhere, probably.

See, the NFL had never inducted a punter into the Hall of Fame, and Ray Guy was far and away the best there ever was. There's no way to confirm that Kluwe's Post-It was even partially responsible, but in 2014, the NFL finally gave Ray Guy the plaque he deserves.

Whether the league has changed its stance on hating gay people remains to be seen.

Adam hosts a podcast called Unpopular Opinion that you should listen to on Soundcloud and a live stand-up comedy show of the same name that you should come see sometime if you're in the Los Angeles area. You should also be his friend on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

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