The art of sending hate mail: ‘People enjoy being insulted’

One night, illustrator Mr Bingo was in his studio having a few drinks and looking at his extensive collection of vintage postcards. "It's a shame I've never sent any of them to anyone," he thought. "I'd like to send someone a very rude, offensive postcard." So he went on Twitter and typed: "I will send an offensive postcard to the first person who replies to this tweet."

About 50 people replied. The first was a man called Jonathan Hopkins. Mr Bingo took one of his postcards, drew a picture and wrote: "Dear Jonathan, fuck you Jonathan, fuck you and fuck your shit legs." Then he tweeted a photograph of his hand putting the postcard into a postbox.

“I started getting requests from other people for [postcards],” he says. “A few days later I opened it as a service on my website and started charging for them.”

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Mr Bingo: “It’s not meant to actually be cruel”

Mr Bingo’s Hate Mail service started at £5 per postcard, but this quickly rose to £50. He couldn’t keep up with the orders. There was a seemingly endless stream of people willing to pay to be insulted. He has, by now, produced more than 1,000 items of hate mail, detailed drawings accompanied by profanity-strewn invective.

They range from declarations such as: “You are shit with boats,” accompanying a picture of someone being woefully bad at manoeuvring a boat, to a card featuring a circle with a picture of Hitler in it, overlapping with a circle featuring a picture of Ronald McDonald. In the intersection Mr Bingo has written “You”.

Rapping about bookbinding

The service recently closed, and this occasion is being marked by a book, Hate Mail: The Definitive Collection, which collects his postcards. It was funded by a high-profile Kickstarter campaign (an earlier book was published by Penguin in 2011). He launched it with a rap video ("I'm very pleased I got to rap about bookbinding") and a complex reward system for funders that would see Mr Bingo wash their dishes or join them for a date in a Wetherspoon pub. It was coupled with typically profane updates (one is titled "Impatient c**ts") and it became the most-funded UK Kickstarter publishing project ever. He sees it all as an extension of the art work.

“I love making art that interacts with the public as opposed to making something and putting it on a wall and saying ‘Look at this’,” says Mr Bingo, who will be discussing his project at an event at this year’s Offset festival in Dublin. “That’s why Kickstarter was made for me, because of all those direct relationships you can have . . . About half the rewards I offered involved meeting me in real life and doing something with me.”

Twenty people bought the “get shitfaced on a train” package, for example. “I split them into four groups of five people and gave them all the dates and times, met them in a station in London and handed out the tickets and bought all the food and drink,” he says. “We went for about two hours on the train to places like Bournemouth and Norwich. When we got there we would get out for five minutes then get back on and come back to London – a four-hour round trip.”

Did he get drunk on the train? “Well, I had to,” says Mr Bingo. “I’m not that much of a big drinker, but I had to because I promised that as part of the reward. I couldn’t let people down.”

Was he worried about who might turn up? Everyone he met was lovely, he says. “I went around one person’s house to do the washing-up and she was a forensic [investigator], so we spent the evening talking about murder scenes. On the last train trip there was a roadie from Dire Straits in his 60s and a guy who was an inventor.”

The success of the Kickstarter project meant he had more than 3,000 people to cater to, he says, and he did get a bit burned-out. “It became mentally and physically exhausting after a while,” he says. “[It was] about a year’s worth of work squeezed into four months. I stopped seeing my friends and family and worked on the Kickstarter for 12-16 hours a day for a few months.”

What makes a mailworthy insult? “It has to be funny. And it’s not meant to actually be cruel. There are four things I don’t go into as a rule: racism, homophobia, disability and religion. Those aren’t right.”

Has he ever accidentally insulted anyone for real with his postcards? “Some of the issues are things that could upset people, but it’s called ‘Hate Mail’, and if you buy one you’ve got to be thick-skinned. If you’re 25 stone and you get called ‘fat’ by accident [in one of my postcards], then that’s not my fault.”

People tend to respond in kind. His Twitter stream has, on occasion, been swamped by “banter” and he gets a lot of correspondence from around the world. “I have the address of my studio on the website so they can get hold of me,” he says. He has received a chocolate Swiss roll with “Fucker” written on it in icing, and a beautifully cross-stitched piece of fabric that declared “You draw like a girl”.

“That isn’t an insult really,” he notes.

Why was Hate Mail so popular? "I think people like it because it's very affordable art. It's a signed, one-off piece of artwork written to yourself. And people like it because it's a fun thing to get in the post and nearly all post nowadays is bad news, a bill or junk mail. It's nice to get something in the post you actually like. And there's a weird sadomasochistic side to people where they enjoy being insulted . . . When people go to see a comedian and the comedian picks on people, they actually quite enjoy it."

Pretentious artist

He has never had a plan for his career. He is influenced by illustrators and artists such as Quentin Blake and David Shrigley but says his real idols are comedic. Growing up he loved Bottom, Only Fools and Horses and Dad's Army – "just silly humour". People are bored, he says, and something funny on social media can "brighten their day".

What does the wider art world make of his oeuvre? “I’ve no idea. I’ve never wanted to be a pretentious artist. I like to call myself an artist but I’m really happy for anyone on the street to like my work. I’ve never wanted the art world to be really impressed by it.”

Now that the Hate Mail series is concluded, he says he's at a bit of a crossroads. He's thinking of going back to using his real name, although he refuses to tell me what that is. "I can't trust you, you're a journalist," he says and he points me instead to his Wikipedia page, where someone recently posted that his original moniker is James John O'Neil. His nickname has been "Bingo" since he won money at Gala Bingo in Maidstone in 1998 at the age of 19, he says, "and for ages I kept my real name a secret like some sort of cool Banksyesque artist. I realised that it was kind of handy for people not to know your real name because it annoyed people and made them talk about you more and built you up to be this kind of legend that, of course, you're not . . . On the other hand I decided recently that I was 37 years old and that it was a bit babyish to keep hiding my real name."

He hasn’t needed to do any commercial illustration for a while and he is now “thinking about ideas”. He’s about to change his website to reflect this. The front page will say “something like, ‘Mr Bingo was a commercial illustrator for 15 years and now he’s having a go at being an artist.’ ”

• Offset is at BGE Theatre, Dublin, April 8th-10th. iloveoffset.com. Offsite: Amplify Your City, a mini-design festival as part of Offset, is in various Dublin venues, March 30th-April 10th