Nice guys the world over are sure of one thing besides death and taxes: people love assholes. Curb Your Enthusiasm fans are also aware of this fact, or at least they should be, considering how much of an asshole Larry David is. Bukowski fans should know this too. And David Sedaris fans.

The obnoxious dickheads always win, people. So why the hell is anyone perplexed by Toby Young's success?

After getting fired from his dream job as a writer for Vanity Fair magazine — for repeatedly embarrassing editor Graydon Carter with stunts such as sending a strippergram to a colleague on Take Our Daughters to Work Day and snorting cocaine with bad-boy artist Damien Hirst during a photo shoot — Young published a memoir in 2001 about his self-abuse and social stupidity titled "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People."

But it didn't end there. Young continued to take his limited experiences and juice them beyond any reasonable expectation. He created an extensive body of work based around a handful of personal misfortunes and embarrassing social interactions, backdropped by Manhattan's gimlet swirl and peopled by vapid fashionistas, snobs and boldfaced names.

Those incidents have graced the page (in book form and dozens of newspaper and magazine articles), the stage and now the screen. All the more surprising for a guy who seems to invariably provoke strong reactions in those he meets, who's variously been described in the British press as "a bold satirist" and a "skinny-chested opportunist with the looks of a punctured beachball, the charisma of a glovepuppet and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane."

Via e-mail, Vanity Fair's editor explained his surprise at Young's ability to parlay an undistinguished six-month stint at the magazine into an oeuvre. "I can only compare it with a brief one-night stand that results in octuplets," Carter said.

In other words, Young's stories are mixtures of gin, vodka, Sex and the City, Truman Capote columns, Ugly Betty, Arthur, Boogie Nights, Tucker Max blog posts, Curb Your Enthusiasm and George Costanza's fictional life.

Uh, yeah, truly a mystery how someone gets famous using all those failures as inspiration.