Jason Pargin

Jason Keith Pargin ( PAR-jin; born January 10, 1975) is an American novelist, humorist, and internet personality. Writing for many years under the pen name David Wong, he founded the humor site Pointless Waste of Time and later served as executive editor of Cracked.com.

He is the author of the comic Lovecraftian horror series John Dies at the End (2007–present) and the Zoey Ashe series (2015–present), as well as the standalone novel I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom (2024). John Dies at the End was adapted as a feature film in 2012.

Pargin retired the David Wong pseudonym in 2020, and since 2022 has produced short-form videos regarding social phenomena on TikTok and other social media platforms, which he has credited with sustaining his writing career. Since 2023, he has co-hosted the Mountain Monsters watch-along comedy podcast Bigfeets.

Early life and education

Jason Keith Pargin was born in Lawrenceville, Illinois, on January 10, 1975. Pargin’s family attended an Evangelical church while growing up. He has described his upbringing as "sheltered", living in a small town of approximately 5,000 people at the time. He and fellow writer John Cheese (real name Mack Leighty) attended high school together and met during an art class they shared.

Pargin attended the Southern Illinois University (SIU) radio-television program, graduating in 1997. He credits his college experience with broadening his horizons. While at SIU, he contributed to the alt.news portion of PBS station WSIU-TV's River Region Evening Edition newscast, hosting a recurring segment called Consumer Advocate. Pargin worked data entry handling claims at an insurance agency prior to becoming an author.

Career

Pointless Waste of Time and Cracked.com

In 1999, Pargin started the humor site Pointless Waste of Time (PWOT), which would eventually be absorbed into Cracked.com. While working at a law firm, Pargin would spend his days copy editing insurance claims and nights posting humor articles on PWOT. Every Halloween on the site he wrote a new chapter of an online story that he published as a webserial. An estimated 70,000 people read the free online versions before they were removed in September 2008. Pargin used the feedback from people reading each chapter of the webserial to tweak what would eventually become the book John Dies at the End.

Demand Media hired Pargin to be the head editor for their revamped online magazine, Cracked.com, although Demand was not aware of Pargin's book deal. As part of the deal, he merged PWOT into the Cracked forums. Pargin has described a disconnection between the old Cracked print magazine and the humor site Cracked.com due to multiple relaunches and almost entirely new staff. As a child, he read Cracked magazine's biggest competitor, Mad magazine.

In December 2012, Pargin published the Cracked.com essay "6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person", which argues that personal qualities have value to others through the actions and skills they produce. The essay was discussed by Jesse Marczyk in Psychology Today and therapist Gordon Shippey at CounsellingResource, both of whom examined its argument about the relationship between personal value and action. Pargin later stated that it had received more than 25 million page views.

In another popular article published at Cracked.com, Pargin coined the neologism "monkeysphere" which introduces the concept of Dunbar's number in a humorous manner. Pargin referred to Dunbar's number again in his second novel This Book Is Full of Spiders.

David Wong nom-de-plume

When Pargin started writing online, he took on the nom-de-plume of David Wong to keep his real and online lives separate. Since much of his writing involved situations similar to his real life, he did not want his co-workers and employers to think that his rants about fictional characters were inspired by real people. The origin of the name was a character from one of his first short stories:

It's not a very interesting story, 'David Wong' was the villain in a story I had written way back in the day, so when I was signing up for my first online accounts in 1998 I started using it. Then when hate mail started coming in with a bunch of racist anti-Chinese insults, I realized I had either gone badly wrong or badly right.

After his book and movie deal, his real name became common knowledge, but Pargin accepted it, saying, "It's not like I'm under the Witness Protection program or anything. I was just trying to keep things simple in my personal life".

In late 2020, Pargin announced that he was retiring the pseudonym, and that future editions of his works would be published under his real name.

Social media

Pargin began posting regularly on TikTok in 2022, after being encouraged to join the platform by the growth of the BookTok community. His videos tend to focus on social phenomena and have reached a wide audience. By 2025, his clips had accumulated more than 500 million views across platforms. He has credited this online visibility with sustaining his writing career and contributing to the sales of later books, including I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom.

In addition to TikTok, Pargin has built a large following on Facebook, where he reported earning significantly more income than from TikTok despite having fewer followers. He also distributes content on YouTube and Instagram. Pargin has spoken about the demands of maintaining a social media presence, stating that most of his professional time is now spent on producing and promoting content rather than on writing itself.

Pargin has commented on the different experiences faced by authors online, observing that female writers often face greater scrutiny regarding their appearance or lifestyle when promoting their work on social media. He has said he makes efforts to promote and support female authors on these platforms.