YHB had seen the film of The Magic Christian (New York: Bantam 1970) in the days of long-ago youth, but this is the first time I’ve read the Terry Southern book. It’s, um, brilliant? I don’t really know. Like the movie, it’s essentially a series of skits, each of which identically has Guy Grand, multi-zillionaire, making it hot for people, and then getting away with it by buying off cops, judges, and witnesses. Some of these are simply bizarre, others are terribly funny, and some are just sad.
As far as I can tell, Guy Grand isn’t trying to make a point; he’s just Tom Green or Andy Dick or Johnny Knoxville with a zillion bucks instead of a TV show, and less interested in shocking other people than pleasing himself. Anyway, he starts out making things hot for people by knocking down a building, erecting a huge heated vat, filling it with blood, urine and manure from the stockyard, and dumping ten thousand hundred-dollar bills in it. Then he leaves. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Then he does it again and again, sometimes entertainingly, sometimes bewilderingly, sometimes involving himself personally, and other times keeping his Olympian distance. He doesn’t particularly pick his victims; he abuses a hot-dog vendor as well as the social crème, and seems to have particular fun confounding audiences of mass-media entertainment. There is certainly no sense that the saps deserve what they get, at least no more than anybody else would. Not all of his escapades are as brutal (or as literal, Mr. Southern admits) as the hot vat; the final, almost poetic fraud has him simply opening up a small Manhattan grocery store on evening, having a ludicrous “Get-Acquainted” sale with everything going for pennies on the dollar, and then closing it and opening it somewhere else in town, also for one day of ludicrous bargains.
And some say it does, in fact, still go on—they say it accounts for the strange searching haste which can be seen in the faces, and especially the eyes, of people in the cities, every evening, just about the time now it starts really getting dark.
In essence, though, this is a dirty book. Its appeal, which is really quite powerful, is to that portion of the reader which dreams, only slightly guiltily, of the magnificent revenge he could extract if only he had a zillion dollars. The slow, careful, obsessive, insane preparations for the more extravagant japes are terribly seductive, and I find myself planning my own vicious abuses. I would never carry them out, of course; no, it’ll be charity for me, when my ship comes in. No bribing textbook publishers to include false histories or impossible problem sets, no buying a radio station and playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” twenty-four hours a day, no having myself crowned the Messiah in the Dirkson Senate Office Building and then publishing the video to the embarrassment of the dozens of senators and representatives in attendance, no, not for Your Humble Blogger.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Satire.
,
-Vardibidian.