As Farrah Fawcett has found out—so to speak—there is no worse fate for a celebrity than to die in Michael Jackson’s shadow. I’ve just seen that the scheduled “Farrah’s Story” on MSNBC has been replaced with backdoor footage of one of those turgid Jackson interviews. Farrah passed on front-loaded; Billy Mays—the carnival-barker style pitchman—is lost in the huzzah of the rear.

Billy Mays was, like, Jackson, age fifty. As a sampling of pop culture, you might think that would be the end of their affinity. But wait—there’s more! Mays was universally reviled for his loudly renowned products and Jackson is in the middle of the expected (yet no less unbearable) translation into sainthood.

Michael Jackson is being remembered by literate journalists as “a breaker-downer of divisions.” He brought down the walls, say the pundits, between musical styles, between blacks and whites, between men and boys. That’s a lot of freight for an ace hoofer with saccharine and dewy-eyed pop tunes.

Billy Mays made himself memorable by being purposely irritating—the ascendancy of negative reinforcement. Let me restate—he made himself memorable. He became his own meme. I couldn’t name a single product that he ever pitched. I thought I did—Slap-Chop—until it was pointed out to me that was Vince’s baby. Vince is a whole different kind of annoying, and after the hooker-slapping incident, he has become the bad boy of the barker industry.

Mays broke down the taste barrier in product presentation. He compensated for lazy audio technicians by bringing his own soaring volume to the late-night table. Faced with unenergized (and unenergizing) products, he tried to make up for them with psychotic enthusiasm. One had the suspicion of a mania and perhaps a madness behind Billy Mays, as if he might pull out an axe if you didn’t call right now. As far as the fear factor in advertising, he was this generation’s Johnny Smoke.

Let’s talk turkey. Michael Jackson’s real genius was in making himself memorable as well. Brilliant dancer? Sure. Even though the Wikipedia-level research of most journalists are miscrediting him with inventing the Moonwalk (a dance step to be seen in even an old Abbott & Costello movie from the ‘40s), Jackson had beautiful élan in the stomping mode. But there is no market in America for dancers. Thus we permitted the fiction that his warbled pop drivel was inspired and transforming.

Jackson’s secret to promoting supposed racial harmony was his mastery of the role of Non-Threatening Black Person. Fragile-physiqued, eyes-lowering, overly polite, overly soft-spoken, his stardom was almost apologetic. So self-effacing, he seemed like the kind of guy you could trust your kids with. Ahem. Real musical geniuses—I dunno, Jimi Hendrix?—well, look what happened when they used him for an opening act for the Monkees. Michael Jackson should have played with the Monkees. Bubbles would have added immensely to that tableau.

But I’m sure Jimi Hendrix was scary (even though white kids listened to him from day one, even though early MTV played his old videos on Closet Classics—even though—well, I’m not permitted to discount the myth of MJJ the Racial Healer…)

Billy Mays was a private man. He never discussed his private life, whereas we know all too much about Jackson’s—including a speculative cast-of-Oliver’s worth of alleged lovers. Just in case this sounds too arch, I’ve actually seen an interview with Mays. Neil Cavuto had him on his, er, unique economic forum. Mays was toned down, sane, and showed good humor. He declined an opportunity to take a potshot at Vince’s lovelife.

Now compare this to any Michael Jackson interview, each of which oozed with patent creepiness. Jackson had a way of being fond of little boys that made it creepy even if it wasn’t in a pedophile context. We went, somewhere down the line, from nonthreatening to—ugh.

Which brings us back right again to find that Michael Jackson wasn’t the man we think he was at all. Nobody could be that daffy, even though his daffiness was profound. Billy Mays crafted a daffy persona for the masses, but seems he shook it off after a day’s work, like a steelworker showers off the grime. Michael Jackson somewhere embraced the crazy. It’s been revealed that the Elephant Man and the Oxygen Chamber were games he played with the media, to keep his fame buoyant. So at one time, he wasn’t crazy, just looked it.

But Jackson never reckoned that these non-sequitors would come to wholly define him. That the people might believe them, swallow them whole. That he might come to believe them. People also believed Mays; he must really be that obnoxious. In the end, both of these personas scalded the persons wearing them. Fame and its blowback.

Jackson did the right thing by dying at fifty. His little old man future did not bode well for his act. I’ll never credit his tunes, though I will always respect his dancing, as well as his ability to spin sugar out of air. Instead of fading anonymously on a chorus line, he made himself famous for being famous.

As did Mays, pitchman for the unsalable, utilizer of the useless. Jackson and Mays—lives spun out of cotton candy, returned to the same substance, together.