If you are reading my blog and you have yet to read something written by Tucker Max, you must be my mother.  I think everyone else has at very least heard of him.  I have a close friend who has been trying to turn everyone onto Max’s writing for a year now.  I’m an open-minded person (and really attractive, funny and interesting – girls, call me) so I checked out his wildly successful blog.  I suppose it was funny.  His book is a New York Times best-seller so he must be doing a lot of things right.

(By the way, Tucker, you’re welcome for the free endorsement.  Because this is the best damn advertising you could possibly ask for.  You’re welcome, sir.)

The other day, I decided to go back and look over some of the many columnists, bloggers and writers that I read about a year ago.  It’s a cleansing, cathartic experience for a reader – read what you once read, see where you were, laugh, cry, inevitably you will vomit.  And then I ran into this entry on Max’s site.  

Again, dude you’re so welcome for the publicity.  By the way, I live in Austin, come visit me, we’ll have a few (hundred) beers and make up completely fake sex stories together.  Or maybe we’ll just embellish and exaggerate our own personal sexperiences until they are appealing to 18-year-old boys who feel better about not getting any when they read our awful stories.  That’s right, I said what every other sane person who has read your blog thinks but does not voice.

Max’s retaliatory post is in response to Michael Ian Black’s joke about rigging a fight between him and Max.

When I see this happen, I have to decide between two equally logical conclusions.  First, I can conclude that scrawny, effeminate Black was truly calling Tucker Max out with the intention of fighting him.  Or I can believe that Max, in his take-every-personal-dig-way-too-seriously-because-I-don’t-have-the-wit-to-combat-it-with-words-by-the-way-I’m-badass mindset, salivated at the chance to prove to (probably himself) everyone that he was hard, willing to fight, and a big enough man to make a vow so selfless as, “I promise when I kick your ass, I’ll do my best not to leave any permanent damage.”

Now normally the former sounds like the logical conclusion.  But I, like Max in all of his stories, am lying.

So I snooped around Black’s page a little more to see if I might find a response to Tucker’s over-eager proclamation of an impending fight.  Here, Black posted all of the more entertaining responses to his post on Max.  What I found peculiar, but not surprising was how so many of the people who seemed so in favor of Max had no mastery of the English language.  As word men, (that’s what I call us), Tucker, Michael and I should have only one thing in common, respect for our language.  I hope to God I bear no other similarities to Tucker Max – fortunately I’ll never know because he’ll never post anything truthful about himself.

(Let me clarify that I don’t particularly like Michael Ian Black.  I think he is a comedian who rode a very simple and undeveloped comedic strategy to fame.  I don’t like oversimplification.  I already wrote about that.  Don’t make me write it again.  Okay, I’ll write it again sometime.)

Anyway, of Black’s favorite comments, two of the 20 were grammatically sound.  In only 20 comments, ardent max fans managed to spell “your” when intending “you’re” six different times (they were really cramming) and made some of the most embarrassing arguments for their leader.  One guy claimed Tucker to be the “fucken man”, another fan said that Black would look like a “punk bitch” because he would never fight Max but continued to say of Max, “He’ll kick the shit out of you.”, which I found amazing since they wouldn’t even fight.  I especially enjoyed the horribly personal insult one intellectual used, “douchetard”.  I hope Michael Ian Black is an emotional rock because the last time someone called me a “douchetard” (it was Billy McKenzie in the third grade) I bawled uncontrollably.

But what was so much more embarrassing than the grammar – trust me, in my mind, few things are more embarrassing than poor grammar – was the fact that every single person took the idea of the fight seriously.  Every single person in Max’s corner of the ring was adamant that Tucker would win the fight (as if Black had actually intended to physically fight him) and some of them exhibited a bit of sexual excitement at the prospect of blood, permanent scars and disfigurations.

Tucker Max’s core audience is a stupid one.  They write stupid things.  They think stupid things.  And I will put money on the fact that they, like Max, do stupid things.  These are people who think a guy who “sleeps with more women than is safe or reasonable” is awesome.  Just examine that.  Who would confess that he sleeps with more women than is safe on a platform which can be accessed by 6 billion people?  The not-so-discreet implication in that sentence is that he bangs so many women, he compromises his own health which to me means that he is a cache of STDs.  He takes the idea of sleeping with lots of women too far.  The same way Greg Valentino took ‘roiding too far (I mean, you know I’m down with a little bit of anabolic steroids from time to time, but dear God!)

 

 

Just like screwing five girls a week, constant steroid use is really appealing.

 

 

 

I hope that you, my dear, dear reader(s) – not sure if it is indeed plural – would use English when defending me.  Of course, I’d probably prefer to not get into a childish squabble via blogs to begin with – because I like acting my age, albeit 10 years less than Max’s.

 

I know Tucker Max has read that post.  And I hope he saw the defense he got and started to question the direction his literary career was going.  As a writer, it stands to reason that he would want to appeal to a literate audience.  But hey, he makes the money, right?