Tucker Max

by Ben H.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is about Natty Light and Everclear and Absinthe and cheap vodka and expensive vodka. It's about mechanical bulls and anal sex and physically assaulting hockey mascots. It's about drunk driving a car into a donut shop, getting kicked out of Denny's and McDonald's, and waking up with a BAC of .09.

It's about a guy, Tucker Max, who drunkenly stumbles through some of the funniest stories you've ever heard in your life on a constant quest for more: more women, more beer, more madness. TuckerMax.com started out as an online date application: girls could fill out a survey to get the opportunity to go on a date with the great Tucker Max. Despite the fact that, at this point, no one knew who he was, the questions were funny enough that the date application got a fair bit of traffic.

Around this time, Tucker started emailing his friends with the standard 'This is what I've been doing with my life' type of thing. Except that where other people might have been talking about their promotions, Tucker had nothing to say. He had been kicked out of the Law Industry because he wouldn't sleep with a female partner at a firm he was interning at, and had gotten himself fired from his Dad's restaurant business by fighting with the staff. So now he was filling his time drinking fast with fast women, and getting into all manner of trouble. Unsurprisingly, this was a little more entertaining than “I made partner!”.

These emails got forwarded around until Tucker realized that he was onto something, that there was a fan base out there. He uploaded them to his website and then parlayed his ridiculous traffic numbers into a book deal. The book released onto New York Time's Bestseller list, fell off, and then came back on for 3 year run. Throughout all of this, there really wasn't that much said about the man. Most people hadn't heard of him, and it's just a book.

But now there's a movie in theatres, and subversive advertising all over the country, and Tucker's detractors have come out in full force. They use thousands of words to dismiss him as a sad piece of nothing, and they spend a fair bit of time protesting his advocacy of 'rape culture'. They take obvious, dumb jokes and double entendres (“Blind girls never see you coming”) and complain that he is promoting violence against the disabled. They attack him for being nice to his dog.

One of Tucker Max's most dedicated proponents, Tucker Max, minces no words in labeling himself an egomaniac, asshole, womanizer, narcissist...

If you've ever tried to insult someone who not only doesn't care what you say, but finds it mildly amusing to try and outdo you, you'll understand why most everyone (except for Gawker, who enjoy the site traffic their monthly 'take-downs' afford them) got tired of ad hominem attacks.

It didn't take long before they switched their criticism over to his fans. It was once upon a time possible to propose that Tucker's only fans were brainless frat-boy date-rapists. Ask any Cornell graduated newspaper writer: only a mentally challenged, permanently inebriated State-college student could possibly find these stories funny. His work was labeled as 'fratire', the male response to 'chick-lit', and was received with a variety of media-invented buzzwords that failed to ever gain any real hold.

But Tucker spent way too long on the Bestseller list for that argument to hold on. There are a lot of fraternities in America, but college students usually spend what little money they have on cheap beer. Someone else must be buying this putrid, amoral, twisted, disgusting, not-funny-at-all garbage.

Tucker's later stories, once he had achieved minor celebrity, usually started with some female fan emailing him for a date. His defense against his widespread derision as a misogynist was always to claim that half of his fan base were women. The haters ignored this until they finally decided to attend one of Tucker's many book signings, movie screenings, or speeches with the intention of writing more about what a worthless human being he was.

They were then confronted with tons of women who, as one offended feminist put it, were “not reluctant dates dragged there by men exacting revenge for being forced to sit through the "Sex and the City" movie” but instead “die-hard fans”.

But how could this happen? Why would any self-respecting woman find Tucker's writing, wrought of selfish sexcapades, aggressive alcoholism, and one liners like 'You may be able to vote and drive, but you will never be equal', find this kind of thing funny?

Sex education. Obviously. They like to rebel against their parents. Of course. And the widespread availability of internet pornography. Duh. Mature, self-respecting women are able to find all of the humour that they need in a good Virginia Woolf book.

The funny thing about this dichotomy of Tucker Max fans is that the vast majority of his insults are directed at those exact people. Whether he's telling a woman that she has obvious 'daddy issues' or making state-college jokes, he has absolutely no patience for idiots. If he views a woman he is talking to as uneducated or lacking in self-respect, the verbal onslaught is terrifying.

Though he recognizes that the vast majority of his fellow human beings are idiots, Tucker doesn't want dumb fans. He complains about running into fans at Best Buy and them being disappointed he's not 'Tucker Max Drunk'. Just as his critics misinterpret his work as misogynistic and unintellectual, those fans love his stories for his woman-jokes and the dumb shit he does.

There is a very important difference there. Unless you've spent the last ten years with a stick up your ass (or five years in the Law Industry), Tucker's woman jokes and ridiculous escapades are raucously entertaining. Unlike his detractors, his fans are at least reacting to stuff that's actually in his work, whereas his critics seem to have never read it.

But neither of them really seem to get it.

More than the individual stories themselves, Tucker’s movie and book are about the kind of guy who could have this many stories. The fact is, Tucker ran down the aisle so he could get out on the ice with that mascot. He talked a girl into giving him the Absinthe, and he started the Breathalyzer competition that had him waking up legally drunk. These stories didn't come out of nowhere, he made them happen.

And, in my opinion, that's the true appeal. The media has come up with a variety of reasons that someone so outwardly antisocial could be so loved. Some say that it's his complete disregard of social norms, that he appeals to the rebel in us all. Others say it is his alcoholism and promiscuousness, that his work was seductive in it's vices. Fans say that it's his devil may care attitude and unrelenting confidence, a sort of Tyler Durden thing where people like Tucker because he doesn't care what they think of him.

But the truth of the matter is that Tucker doesn't need to seduce people into reading his work. It's good enough as it is. It is, however, a supreme folly to underestimate the fact that Tucker's character attracts readers, that there is something about his persona behind all of the fame.

And for some people, it's the confidence or rebelliousness. In my opinion, however, this is a superficial appeal. Tucker's true charm is the way that he always looks for... well not trouble, but his kind of fun is pretty much the same thing.

There are people in this world who take what the world gives them. If their Friday night isn't going the way they had planned it, they go home and start think about 'what if' situations. What if I had drank more heavily, what if I had gotten up the nerve to talk to that girl, what if I had gone to a strip club in the ghetto at 2 at night...

Tucker Max is too much of a rebel, just way too arrogant to just let the conditions define his life. If he's not having a good time, he takes the dramatic, drastic steps necessary to change his fortunes. And this is his core appeal: the 'what if' stories that other people are thinking of, Tucker's out there living them.