In ‘Pure Innocent Fun’, critic Ira Madison III (BA ’08) revisits pop culture influences
April 17, 2025
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Cultural critic, writer, and podcaster Ira Madison III (BA ’08) studied theater at Loyola University Chicago, trying his hand at writing, acting, directing, and stage management. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Madison built a media career as a multi-hyphenate.
Still, his immense popularity across cultural mediums is something few could have predicted. He has written for Buzzfeed, The Daily Beast, and MTV News, launched the popular podcast Keep It!, and recently published Pure Innocent Fun, a book of essays exploring his fascination with pop culture. The elective courses he took at Loyola, including a course with playwright Michael Bassett, set the stage for his later success. “I’m glad I took those electives because they weren’t part of the regular theater curriculum,” he says.
Following graduation, Madison moved to New York to intern in the magazine world, and a year later started a master’s degree in dramatic writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. By 2011, he had moved to Los Angeles and begun writing for mainstream media outlets. “I’ve really just used writing for the media and my playwriting and screenwriting experience to bounce back and forth between mediums,” he says.
Madison’s writing and guest spots on a few popular podcasts attracted the attention of Crooked Media, who approached him in 2017 to co-host a new pop culture-oriented podcast, Keep It!, along with fellow pop culture critics/writers Louis Virtel and Kara Brown. Across the show’s different host permutations, Madison and Virtel have remained the constant, dissecting the latest music, film, and television every week with big doses of humor and a deep knowledge of pop culture. “I never wanted the show to be a couple friends on a podcast agreeing the whole time, because what’s the point of listening to that?” Madison says.
In a recent episode of Keep It!, he quipped about an Academy Awards acceptance speech from songwriters Camille and Clément Ducol and director Jacques Audiard, who won an Oscar for best original song for the Netflix film Emilia Pérez: “I have never wanted the hook from The Apollo [Theater] to come out quicker and pull these people off stage … And they will be hearing from Stephen Sondheim’s lawyer as soon as I contact them and tell them that they need to sue.”
Virtel replied drily, “Right, I’m sure they’ll listen to you.”
The duo’s chemistry is a big part of why Keep It! has been one of the most beloved pop culture podcasts of the last decade, ranked by Listen Notes as one of the top 0.05% of 3,532,134 podcasts globally. In addition, Keep It! has scored some of the biggest names in film, theater and media, including Jane Fonda, Cate Blanchett, and Angela Bassett.
I like being a multi-hyphenate, because one, I get bored easily, and two, I love being creative in any way possible.
— Ira Madison III
The show doesn’t just engage with the latest pop culture; Madison and (especially) Virtel are film nerds who often reference classic films. It’s not only the audience that regularly gets an impromptu lesson in film history, Madison points out; in preparing for and hosting episodes, he also fills gaps in his cinematic knowledge.
Even though Keep It! is still going strong after eight years, Madison isn’t content to rest on his laurels. “I like being a multi-hyphenate, because one, I get bored easily, and two, I love being creative in any way possible.” After landing his first TV writing gig in 2019, on the Netflix series Daybreak, he’s written for several other series on the streaming platform, including Q-Force and Uncoupled.
Pure Innocent Fun has given him the space to dive deeper into pop cultural criticism in a more considered fashion than his podcast allows. The essays blend memoir with cultural criticism, reflecting on pop culture’s influence on his coming of age as a Black, gay man in Milwaukee.
One of the implicit takeaways of Madison’s book is his defense of pop culture critics have dismissed as “bad” or “trashy”—a theme that arises in reference to Britney Spears, daytime soap operas, and one of the most widely viewed Black sitcoms of the ’90s, Family Matters. Madison writes, it “was over-the-top, and yes, Steve Urkel’s campy, borderline-sci-fi and, eventually, literal-sci-fi storylines … did threaten to take over the series. But with as much retroactive hate as the series gets, you’d wonder why the ratings didn’t flatline before the series was moved to CBS. And that’s because people didn’t particularly mind the outlandish storylines.”
Although Madison’s book focuses on the culture that shaped him before arriving at Loyola, he says the theater, music, film and TV he consumed between 2004 and 2008 constituted a major part of his college education. At a movie theater near the Lake Shore Campus, he saw the premiere of the Chinese martial arts film Hero, starring Jet Li. Theaters like the Steppenwolf and About Face were also nearby, one of the benefits of going to college in Chicago, which, while offering rich cultural amenities, is far more affordable than New York, he says.
Madison, who is somewhat burned out with current trends in the TV industry, says he is turning his attention to more personal, long-form writing projects. After the 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike, he realized he wanted to “focus on work that represented myself, work that I could really be proud of and where I wasn’t answering to other people.”
In many ways, Pure Innocent Fun represents the first project that is completely his. “I’m less interested in ephemeral work right now,” he says. “My book exists. It’s right there. I can pick it up and read it. It’s in bookstores.”
