Being Tucker Max

The surreal experience of playing bro culture’s sleaze-god on stage

“My name is Tucker Max, and I’m an asshole.”

This was my nightly introduction to a month’s worth of sold-out audiences. And each time I said it, and the 90 minutes of unforgivable verbiage that followed it, I laughed queasily to myself and wondered: how did I end up playing bro culture’s most successful, unrepentant sleaze-god? How did anyone allow a candy-ass liberal art-puff like me to play this role? How did I allow myself?

I wasn’t the only one asking this. Through the months and weeks leading up to our premiere, I’d been assailed on Twitter and in person by well-meaning folk with anguished and disbelieving questions. These were mostly along the lines of: “But…why? Don’t you HATE him?”

The fact is, yes, I hate the writing of Tucker Max. Ever since the emergence of his blog in 2002, he has been the voice of everything I’ve always hated about masculinity. A Duke Law graduate and a poisonous narcissist (self-
described), he’s America’s most prominent Bro Culture icon. Starting with the now-legendary I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, every page of his three (THREE!) books drips with a hatred for women, nestled alongside a desperate need to conquer them sexually. It has, to put it mildly, paid off. His stories of fucking, hazing and dangerous alcohol consumption have graced the New York Times bestseller list, been adapted into a film and made him one of the most celebrated and hated men in the country.

To be clear, he’s proficient enough and he knows his way around a story hook (Tucker told me about his writing/editing process, and it’s a bluntly brilliant series of “keep ‘em reading” refinements). I just think the stuff panders to the worst, most entitled, most destructive instincts of straight white guys. This is a group to which I myself belong, so I know: we already ruin fucking everything, and we don’t need encouraging. Tucker has been deified for chronicling the worst misogyny and xenophobia we have to offer, and doing it with a triumphant smirk.

So when Kit Sanderson, a gifted writer and director, asked me to play Tucker Max in the amusingly-titled “I Hope They Serve Beer on Broadway,” I balked. But he persistently laid out his pitch: that we were going to Trojan-horse art into frat culture, that the show would be an exercise in context and presentation, that we would all get very, very, VERY rich through this seemingly insane, improbable lark. I eventually began to see the appeal (especially the part about getting very, very, VERY rich), but I was still left with a lingering, gnawing feeling that by playing Tucker I would be bringing him more glory.

To combat these worries, I told the director I had two conditions. First, the show could not be a celebration of Tucker’s worldview. And second, I got to play Tucker as the text suggested him to me, however unflattering my interpretation might be. Sanderson, to my surprise, had already been thinking along those lines; as far as he was concerned, this show would be as much spoof and travesty as anything else. I wasn’t entirely convinced that this would keep me from hating myself if I did it — often, ironic bigotry just looks like, well, bigotry — but I was reassured enough to take the role.

Sanderson’s cast, gratifyingly, was a motley assemblage of genders, ages, body types, sexualities, and ethnicities (as Tucker would have it, “theater fags”). We made an instant connection and developed marvelous chemistry, but this made it no easier to spout such problematic prose. Early in rehearsal, as I spat one typically hateful passage into the face of a brilliant and talented actress, I had a moment of feeling like the worst person in the world. Yes, I was acting, but just hearing the words exit my mouth made me feel rotten and cruel and pathetic.

The idea of actually being that guy scared me to death. What if people saw no irony in my performance? What if they took the whole thing at face value? What if (and this was what really frightened me) these words were expressing something inescapable, something so pounded into our heads from years of patriarchal indoctrination that I might have it INSIDE ME, like some kind of H.R. Giger chestburster made of ground chuck, football, and hate?

Tucker and legions of his fans will tell you that he’s just acting out the male id—that we all THINK these things, but Tucker actually has the balls to say and do them. This is a classic asshole’s defense, like Gary Oldman saying that everyone has made racist or homophobic remarks in private. It’s an attractively easy way to claim that everyone else is a hypocrite. But why did I worry so much that I was that guy? What was hitting so close to home that I couldn’t shake that terror?

My mother and (especially) her mother were role models and no-bullshit feminists, the kind of women who called out macho jackassery where they saw it. In our house, showing sensitivity and respect towards women was seen as the virtuous, indeed, the masculine thing to do. The thing that was humiliating was being just another meathead. This was in the age before I understood how fluid a thing gender can be, but it presented a helpful model. I’d had some lapses as a young man—there had been times when I took the easy road and simply gaslighted or talked over women, times when I was less than the man I wanted to be—but they had been pointed out to me and I’d felt dreadful about them. Maybe what scared me about Tucker was the suggestion that if I just stopped caring, if I stopped looking at the world through a critical lens and took the easy road, I’d be like him. I hope that’s not the case. I believe it isn’t.

In any case, that moment of doubt and revulsion was the key to my understanding of Tucker Max and his ilk. If you can say or even listen to things like this with a straight face, you either end up loathing yourself, or you’re an absolute sociopath. Since it’s statistically impossible that every Tucker Max fan is a sociopath, well, you do the math.

Tucker himself comes off as a weirdly dissociated individual. On the few occasions that I spent more than a handful of minutes in his presence, he seemed wide-eyed and a little lost. I never got the sense that he was passionate about anything, or that he had any deeply held beliefs. One night he came and saw me perform in a burlesque show and went to dinner with me and a bunch of my compatriots afterwards. He made a few vulgar jokes (including one about Frederick Douglass that I won’t repeat here), but overall he seemed to be fairly humorless. He only snapped into focus for me once or twice.

The first time, I almost choked. “I consider myself a feminist,” he stated with confidence after we ordered.

“You WHAT?”

“Well, everything I do is to impress women so they’ll go to bed with me.” His face betrayed no trace of irony. He went on to discuss second- and third-wave feminism in ways that might charitably be called reductive.

The other time I think I really saw him that night was when a clearly disturbed woman came over to our table with questions about publishing her poetry. She’d overheard some of our conversation and realized that Tucker was a man with some clout. While the rest of us floundered a bit, Tucker proceeded to give genuine advice about how to reach a publisher. He didn’t make fun of her or cruelly dismiss her. He was calm, instructive and compassionate. And then after she left, he gave us all a silent bug-eyed look that said “WOOF, am I right?”

I wonder who he is. I think he wonders too. Tucker seems a little embarrassed about who he WAS — he’s very clear that he’s not “that guy” anymore — but he’s as unclear as I am about the man he’s become. When he told us tales of sexual misadventure and misbehavior, it was with an affectless resignation. Is this the inevitable endpoint of the Bro Revolution? A generation of men so accustomed to unimpeded privilege and pleasure-seeking that when they finally hit their 30s the crashing emptiness of it all descends on them like a fog? If it is, where do we go from here?

Our only real tragedy, white men like Tucker and me, is that we’re so often unaware of how our privilege hurts us even as it hurts those without it. Pity isn’t the right response — we’ve had it too good for pity. But as much as our victims are rightly furious about their mistreatment and marginalization, we should be enraged at ourselves for constantly buying the same false bill of goods. All it does is leave us stunned, alone and irrelevant. When the people whose suffering has profited us finally rise up, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Surely, we’re more than our ids. I have to believe that base, selfish, primitive urges don’t make up the whole of a person’s character. Character also includes the choices we make about those urges. Tucker’s entire livelihood depended on his ability to stop making those choices, to run gleefully into the minefield of the id. That’s not strength. That’s not even masculinity, at its root. And that’s not the way I’ve ever wanted to live my life. I met my shadow self over a plate of fries, and while I couldn’t bring myself to hate him (much as I wished I could), he was unmistakably Christmas Future in a T-shirt and jeans.

So of course I mostly played him for laughs, slapstick, and shark-eyed sarcasm. It seemed to work.

A curious thing happened when we finally got the show in front of audiences. On the page, Tucker’s characters were faceless, anonymous iterations of easily-mocked types—the butt of his cruel joke. But once you saw his stories played out in physical space, sympathy was automatic. The joke was instantly on the callow, hard-partying dickhead doing all the mocking. It’s egregious to read Tucker’s inner thoughts about the women in his life, but on stage it becomes clear: this is a privileged, terrified little boy who can’t comprehend women. Or gays. Or people who LOOK OR ACT DIFFERENTLY FROM HIM IN ANY WAY AT ALL. And the more I played the terror alongside all that overcompensating braggadocio, the bigger the laughs got.

Events that seemed designed to humiliate his sexual partners and social inferiors (for him, there’s a lot of overlap) on the page made him look like a gigantic, blundering idiot when they were acted out. It all made a terrible, gratifying, very funny sort of sense. Tucker, naturally, hated it. But he was very courteous about it. He wrote a “review” on his blog that detailed his objections—but he admitted that all of his friends loved it and thought it really captured him. Tucker was appalled by their response, saying that if my portrayal even came close to anything he had ever been, he would have to “kick [his] own ass.” I have never been prouder of anything in my artistic life.

Even though he hated my performance, or at least the version of himself I was performing, he still came every night to see this strange little crew of freaks, queers, and artists burlesquing his life story.

At one point we discussed grabbing a drink before he left town, just the two of us, but we never really followed up on it. Perhaps that’s just as well. Though there was no animosity in any of our exchanges, I don’t think either one of us liked what we saw reflected in each other.

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