This piece originally appeared in 2021 in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It appears here to celebrate Terry Southern’s May 1 centennial. Zoomba!
SATIRE, IN THE RIGHT HANDS, is nobody’s friend. It should make you wince, maybe even disgust you, at least as often as it makes you laugh. We’re now living in the best, and most dangerous, time for satirists — if, that is, you recognize that satirists are not advance agents for social justice, not benign tellers of parables designed to make you giggle politely at someone else’s foibles and misguided views, but never, ever, your own.
That’s where Blue Movie, Terry Southern’s guided missile of a dirty book, now bravely reissued by Grove Press, comes in. Blue Movie is a farce about the making of Hollywood’s first big-budget, all-star, hardcore porno. It is unlikely to make many friends in 2020: every page is likely to offend the sensitive; the book is designed that way. For me, its only competition as funniest book ever written are Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Fran Ross’s Oreo, a still-waiting-to-be-discovered classic that reads as if James Joyce had been reborn as a Black-Jewish teenage-girl stand-up. Blue Movie, like most of Southern’s work, epitomizes the regard any self-respecting kid who’s been told to behave and keep clean has for the nearest puddle. That is to say, as a chance to splash around and get dirty for the sheer fun of seeing (to paraphrase Southern) whose shit gets hot as a result. The jokes don’t just play with sexist and racist and homophobic conventions — they leap into them, inflate them, make them more ridiculous than ever until they seem candidates for the Mount Rushmore of tastelessness.
I’m not going to falsify the book and claim that its outrageousness is some plea for understanding or tolerance. Southern, like every true comic sensibility, wanted to see how far he could go, and, in the process, to see how far the reader was willing to go. Does Southern go too far? Of course he does. And his blistering short story, “The Blood of a Wig” (the final piece in the superb collection Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes) is about how such a sensibility risks cutting itself off from a humanity it can’t resist trying to outrage. To laugh at Terry Southern, you have to be willing to laugh at what appalls, disgusts, and even upsets you. It is revolting in Blue Movie when a studio boss, a closet necrophiliac, defiles the corpse of his number-one star. But the joke is also the logical extension of the almost cannibalistic nature of the star system. To enjoy Terry Southern, you have to get on the wavelength of an author who was keen on the potential for chaos — and I mean sirens wailing, people-running-through-the-streets-or-battling-each-other-for-the-last-bottle-of-water, full-on-cusp-of-the-apocalypse panic — because he found chaos funny. The sound that echoes through his books is the cackle of the author himself, convulsed at what he has wrought.
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