Terry Southern
The Magic Christian
1959, Grove Press
I know that we’re all supposed to hate Louis CK now–and I certainly agree with anyone who says that his admitted exhibitionist masturbation fetish stuff isn’t much fun to think about–but none of that changes how funny he’s been before. One of my favorite old bits of his is the one in which he wonders why more billionaires don’t use their resources to prank everyone.
“Buy every baseball team and make them all wear dresses.” Open up the world’s worst pet store, where every can of food costs $1 million and where the groomers tell you point-blank that they will have sex with your pets, and keep it open for decades just to confuse people.
The first time I heard it, I hurt myself laughing and, because I’m perpetually behind on my reading, I didn’t realize until this week that Terry Southern had the exact same idea way back in the 1950s when he wrote this still-hilarious novel. It’s about Guy Grand, a perfectly nice and fabulously wealthy fella who has money to burn and so he burns it by relentlessly fucking with the world.
Some of his pranks are merely weird and surreal, such as the one in which he pays a guy to stand on a busy city sidewalk and destroy crackers with a sledgehammer; sounds like something they might have done on the old Late Night with David Letterman.
Others are bizarre monkeywrenches in the works. He might ruin a live television show by paying people outrageous, life-changing sums of money to assist.
Then there’s the book’s culimination in which Grand executes his tour de force, an ultra-exclusive, ultra-expensive, for-the-rich-only cruise that he successfully sells out and then upon which he unleashes an increasingly crazed series of gags that had me screaming like I was being murdered. It’s a breathlessly funny chapter. No one in it gets hurt, but also probably none of these people will ever be the same afterward.
That’s the thing about Guy Grand. He’s a sweetheart, not a sociopath. Grand doesn’t want to hurt a soul. If someone loses their job as a result of his schemes, he pays them off so handsomely that they could buy the business that fired them. He doesn’t hate people or society or have any vendetta. Grand never laughs at his own jokes. He just wants to play his meticulously planned pranks and then watch what happens.
Isn’t that a byproduct of what an artist does? They put out out their novel or their music or their film or their illustrations and then they watch what happens? (Also, if an artist’s tools are color or light or words or sound, Grand’s tool is money; a wad of cash is his paintbrush; hey, you work with what you’ve got.)
That’s part of the appeal of something that shocks or unsettles people. It’s not the mere satisfaction of seeing people upset; no, it’s what you learn about the human condition by how they react to something that provokes or confuses them. Guy Grand would never lower himself to explain his actions in those terms, but you can tell by his generosity and his refusal to boast that Grand is not looking to destroy anything or boost his ego. Grand is never angry. He just wants to do something outrageous and then… watch what happens. I think he wants us ALL to watch what happens.
Anyway, while reading Guy Grand break some of society’s unspoken rules, I broke one of my own rules and paused in the middle of reading this to check out some online reviews. Usually, I avoid that. I don’t read reviews before I’ve written my own. I like to be inside the best secluded bubble I can manage when forming my take.
But here I gave in. I broke my rule. I hit Goodreads.
This is not a long book. The Grove Press paperback currently in print is a mere 148 pages with margins so wide that you could write your own novel in them. You could polish this off in a day or two, but I still couldn’t wait. I had to know what modern readers think of Guy Grand.
I’m fascinated by how so many reviewers today, from professional to amateur, are unable to digest irony. If a moral isn’t delivered with a sledgehammer, they don’t get it. Everything is taken at face value.
Sure enough, the most upvoted review at Goodreads, as of this writing, is from someone who sees it as a novel about a “rich asshole” who goes to work “testing out his theory that there is nothing so degrading or so distasteful that someone won’t do it for money” (the bold font is the original reviewer’s choice). They go on to say that they can discern no humor in this book, particularly at “this sorry point in our history” (this review was posted in December 2017).
Now, this person has a right to their opinion, but their commentary is exactly what I’m talking about above. They’ve brought their baggage to the book. They dislike the wealthy, so Guy Grand is, to them, just a creep and the goal of his actions is to degrade people and nothing more. This person came in with an agenda and can’t read the book that Southern actually wrote.
Guy Grand is the trickster that resides in all of us, rich or poor. If you’ve ever in your life said or thought “I wonder what would happen if…” and then some absurd and disruptive scenario followed, there’s a little Guy Grand in you.
“I wonder what would happen if I laughed out loud right now at this funeral?”
“I wonder what would happen if I objected to this wedding in the middle of the ceremony with some really strange story about aliens that I just made up?”
“I wonder what would happen if, as a joke, I went to Wal-Mart splattered with fake blood and then paced the floor in their lingerie section for hours talking to myself?”
There’s an order to things. There’s an ettiquete. There are standards in life, so many that a curious mind might like to see what happens when you fly against them.
We THINK we know what would happen, but we also know that human beings aren’t 100% predictible, so we’re not always sure.
Guy Grand is a guy who does the absurd thing. His wealth helps him out. It helps out Terry Southern, too, because it gives him a broad canvas of pranks for Grand to play. He doesn’t need to devote a chapter to telling us how Grand affords all of this. In the world of this book, Grand has limitless wealth. When his gags seem too elaborate to make sense, we assume that Grand poured enough money on each one for it to make sense.
All of this allows the book to be short, sharp, and stinging, like any good joke.