Moments before being introduced onto the Kendall Hall main stage, New York Times best-selling author and film producer Tucker Max turned to the nearby College Union Board (CUB) officials and said, “If you smell that … yeah, that was me.”
Yes, Max more or less farted in the faces of the organization paying him $25,000 to speak to a sold out auditorium. This instance of Max’s trademark vulgarity and obscenity was not an exact microcosm of the performance to come, as Max delved into his experiences as a writer and how he came to sell more than 1,000,000 copies of “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.” As anticipated, however, a few fresh stories coupled with his general leases on life were more than off-color.
The more popular of his new stories, set to appear in his new book, “Assholes Finish First,” detailed Max’s encounter with a diabetic New York City model who, after giving him fellatio in Granmercy Park, was discovered to be “trying to use my come to regulate her blood sugar!”
Max also told a story of a night in Mexico, detailing his failed attempt to individually out-drink each of a group of six mid-western sorority girls.
Although known for his wild college tales, Max discussed his life choices not as being humorous and disgusting, but as a part of an underlying message relevant to the college student population.
“Underneath the specifics of the stories, the book is about living the life that you want to live, not the life others push onto you,” he said. “It’s about being the person you want to be, not the person other people want you to be, and it’s about enjoying the time you have.”
Max then took the audience through how the book came to fruition. He discussed how he enjoyed writing as a child, how he wrote a controversial column while attending the University of Chicago, how he hated Duke University Law School and spent his time creating a Web site that would eventually contain much of his book’s content.
He also described how reading “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk changed his life, and how it is impossible to fully understand until “you have worked at a job you fucking hate, after school and you have nothing on the horizon.”
For all of his bashing of law school and the corporate world, the College was not immune to Max’s sharp tongue.
Early in his talk, Max addressed the controversy surrounding his presence to speak at the College.
“I heard there was a little controversy about me coming to campus,” Max said. “I heard that you guys voted twice for me to come here? And my biggest competition was ‘Ace of fucking Cakes’?”
Max went on to say, “I don’t understand why everyone thinks I hate women. Everything I do is to impress women. If I didn’t care whether or not women liked me, I wouldn’t leave my fucking house. I’d just play video games, watch sports and jack off.”
Max also began the night by discussing New Jersey’s newest obsession and regrettable drunken tattoo, “The Jersey Shore.”
“Did people not know that Jersey is full of fucking guidos?” Max asked to a roar of applause.
Following his talk, students from the audience participated in a question-and-answer session, asking questions regarding Max’s sex life among many other topics.
When asked if he had any sexually transmitted diseases, Max credited condoms to a clean bill of health, as he had been screened and deemed uninfected recently. Max also noted that to his knowledge he has no illegitimate children, but did “pay for a lot of abortions.”
The College’s controversy over him speaking came up again during this period, and when asked what he thought about being portrayed as promoting a “culture of rape,” Max said, “You are not going to force me to answer for a crime I have never been accused of …what protestors do is control the discussion of male and female relations. Fuck those people.”
Before Max’s performance, several protestors gathered in front of Kendall, holding handmade signs opposing Max’s views. Dave Chapman, a freshman history major, held a sign reading, “’Fat girls are not real people.’ Way to promote anorexia.”
“He’s just no good,” Chapman said. “I think his sense of humor is sick and it is just unfathomable how he objectifies women and makes light of serious, serious issues that for decades we have tried to overcome and conquer that he just treats as nothing.”
According to CUB director Raquel Fleig, Max’s performance was a success despite the surrounding controversy.
“Overall, we were extremely pleased with the event. The show sold out completely in less than two days, and it seemed that all of those in attendance were big fans of Tucker Max or at least had a genuine interest on what he had to say,” Fleig said. “We appreciated that everyone was respectful while he was speaking and the night ran smoothly from start to finish. Tucker’s lecture was mostly focused on his career and offered a few of his racier stories from his upcoming book, which the crowd seemed to respond well to.”
Underneath all of his cursing and other vulgarities, Max’s message was that, simply, people should be able to do what they want, not what they are told to do.
“I sat in the same seats, drank the same beer, fucked the same girls and passed out in the same fields as you guys … No one around says go follow your dreams or the path less traveled. My life does not exist for me to work at a shitty job I hate.”
He may have a point.
