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Is failure the new success?In a city that is dedicated to the concept of life as a series of victories, celebrations of defeat and misadventure are bursting out all over. Last week there were at least three performances that exalted manifest despair.

On Monday night, a bunch of actors and writers offered sad but true tales of their own experiences with dis-employment in Fired, an evening of monologues organized by an actress who was once fired from an off-Broadway show by her idol, Woody Allen.

Wednesday brought another edition of the monthly Rejection Show to the downtown performance space P.S. 122, in which freelance comedy writers and cartoonists share material that's been rejected by outlets like Saturday Night Live and The New Yorker magazine.

In between, on Tuesday night, half a dozen bloggers took the stage at P.S. 122 for another episode of the WYSIWYG Talent Show to read stories about their miserable lives as minimum-wage slaves. Also a monthly show, WYSIWYG (pronounced wiz-ee-wig, it stands for "what you see is what you get") began on Valentine's Day, 2004, when a bunch of bloggers convened to read essays about the worst sex they'd ever had. The subject may change from month to month, but the self-flagellation is constant.

Then again, WYSIWYG features bloggers, a hard-core on-line species whose primary characteristics include: an inability to wear anything other than pyjamas, to put down their coffee cup, and to step away from the computer.

If you spend any time trolling through the diaries of the anonymous masses available at places like blogger.com or blogging.com, you already know that misery and self-pity are defining features of the so-called blogosphere. (I'm not talking about politically oriented blogs, which are frequently pitiable for other reasons.) On sites like gawker.com, a blog about the New York media world, that wretchedness serves as a comic trope.

Before the Web exploded, people were forced to spend their teens and 20s suffering alone in quiet desperation; Nowadays, they've at least got the consolation that comes from realizing the rest of the world is also pathetic. (Would it be adding insult to injury for me to suggest that most blogs remain ignored and unread, save for the few hits that come from the bloggers' very close friends?)

Which brings us to Michelle Collins, who began her reading at the WYSIWYG Talent Show on Tuesday night by declaring, "I have -- pants down -- the shittiest job in New York City" To wide delight among the underemployed crowd, Collins, 23, explained that she's a legal secretary toiling 9 to 5 for, "a troll-like 55-year-old bitch who has kids at Harvard and Yale and who, given the option, would no doubt pay me in sacks of maggot-infested rice." Collins spends her days getting (poorly) paid to photocopy, fax, and type boring legal documents, which leaves her copious amounts of time to post on-line entries lamenting her existence.

Her slice of life was received gleefully by the sold-out house of about 75, many of them fellow bloggers and, therefore, eager to applaud the fact that someone just like them had at least made it into the dim spotlight on the P.S. 122 stage. It was validating.

Brian Grosz, a strapping web designer/guitarist/stunt driver/writer sporting a shaved head and chunky silver jewellery, followed Collins with a story about how he almost died of carbon-monoxide poisoning while driving a beat-up 1955 Pontiac on the set of the film Catch Me If You Can. Jon Friedman took the mike to talk about his days as an office manager/receptionist for an Internet company during the boom years. Daniel Radosh discussed the two summers he spent measuring newsstands for an official NYC Department of Transportation report that nobody ever read.

Topics of future WYSIWYG shows include the World's Worst Roommate and America's Funniest Home Accidents.

It's true that people don't just flame out proudly in New York. Across our culture, failure is increasingly being taken as a badge of honour by those who reject the simplifying, homogenizing impulses of the mainstream. The syllogistic mantra goes something like: What is popular is dumb and bad. I'm not popular, ergo I must be smart and good. It may be logically questionable, but it's comforting. And here, where the rat race can kill, misery loves company. New York is viewed as a place where people flock from around the world to work hard and achieve their dreams, but few realize that the city has an intimate relationship with crushing failure: All those bitter waiters, baristas and real-estate agents who are actually out-of-work actors waiting for the big break that'll never come; the thousands of families stuck in the city's homeless-shelter system. Don't even ask about the New York Rangers, who -- until the NHL lockout -- had one of the highest payrolls in hockey but regularly failed to make the playoffs. And of course last November, the city voted for John Kerry over George W. Bush by a more than three-to-one margin. Yup, this city knows the agony of defeat.

You might even say that if you can't make it here, congratulations: You fit right in.

shoupt@globeandmail.ca