On this, the tenth anniversary of Christopher Hitchens’ death, there will no doubt be a barrage of articles lamenting the loss of his singular and eloquent voice, and an equal number denigrating his politics or legacy. But I want to mark this day instead by drawing attention to a less appreciated aspect of Hitchens: his comic brilliance.
I don’t mean his well-known gift for witty remarks—such as his reaction to the death of Jerry Falwell in 2007 (“If you gave him an enema, you could have buried him in a matchbox”), or his 1982 comment on a piece of sophistry by Norman Podhoretz (“This argument has a long way to go before it is even half-baked”), or his 1992 riff on the British royal family (“Racked as it is by under- and unemployment, ideological conflict, ecological woe, domestic breakdown, juvenile delinquency and resentment over taxation, and plagued the while by American white-trash imports, the Royal Family is more than ever fulfilling its role as a microcosm of all that is enduring about British values and traditions.”)
No, I mean Hitchens’ full-blown comedic essays—which I think are among his best. Some are written in aid of a serious political point, and some are not (though they usually include some thought-provoking insight). I offer the examples below in the hope that, ten years after his death, more readers will discover—or rediscover—the delights of Hitch the Comic.
“The Canker of Rancour”
In 1986, Hitchens took a break from reportage and analysis to pen a brief parody of a certain type of Washington political thriller. It is one of his rare forays out of non-fiction, and tells a story about a fictionalised version of himself who yearns for recognition:
Hitchens had been in Washington four years, working for a magazine that might have been published on Pluto for all the clout it had. “Screw you,” he would quip wryly to himself as hostesses failed to catch his eye and as movers and shakers in Georgetown and Foggy Bottom looked wildly over his shoulder upon introduction. He’d been meditating revenge ever since a taxi driver had failed to recognize his catastrophically unfashionable address, and the canker of rancour had eaten deeper as he was successively excluded from the Gridiron Club, a decent table at the White House correspondents’ dinner, and—final indignities came in pairs—from the Z list at the Reagan inaugural ball and the A list at “The McLaughlin Group” advertisers’ buffet.
A novel. That would show them. One of those through-the-fly-button, fly-on-the-wall novels. A novel with short, staccato sentences. Often with no verbs in them. The sort that are harder to read than they are to write (the sentences, that is).
The story continues poking fun at the cheap-thriller genre by having the fictional Hitchens invent a series of blatantly formulaic and derivative character and plot devices for his planned novel. And, although the fictional Hitchens fails in his quest for public recognition, the real Hitchens succeeds in deflating a universe of Washingtonian pretentiousness with this brief comic story. Might we call it postmodern? Self-aware and funny it certainly is. And there was more comedy still to come.
Blowjobs and Cruising
In a 2006 Vanity Fair essay, “As American as Apple Pie,” Hitchens looks at the history and nature of the blowjob. The essay is stuffed full of jokes and puns. It climaxes thus:
While the G-spot and other fantasies have dissipated, the iconic U.S. Prime blowjob is still on a throne, and is also kneeling at the foot of that throne. It has become, in the words of a book on its technique, The Ultimate Kiss. And such a kiss on the first date is not now considered all that “fast.” America was not the land of birth for this lavish caress, but it is (if I may mix my anthems) white with foam from sea to shining sea. In other cultures, a girl will do “that” only when she gets to know and like you. In this one, she will offer it as a baiser as she is making up her mind. While this persists, and while America’s gay manhood is still sucking away as if for oxygen itself, who dares to say that true global leadership is not still within our grasp?
In a 2007 essay for Slate, Hitchens’ comic vulgarity continues, though this time with a political point in mind. Senator Larry Craig had recently been caught cruising for sex in a public toilet, and Hitchens couldn’t resist using the opportunity to meditate on this practice, so beloved of gay men. He wonders: though risky public sex had understandably been prevalent in the bad old days when homosexual acts were illegal, why were so many gay men still engaging in the practice in 2007? Citing his old friend, that legendary cocksucker Tom Driberg, Hitchens muses that perhaps it has something to do with the thrill of danger and of leading a secret life, or perhaps some men have an unconscious desire to be caught—particularly those who, like Larry Craig, have felt the need to hide their preferences by adopting a hard-line anti-gay conservatism:
Next time you hear some particularly moralizing speech, set your watch. You won’t have to wait long before the man who made it is found, crouched awkwardly yet ecstatically while the cistern drips and the roar of the flush maddens him like wine.
Some might wonder why a serious writer like Hitchens would choose to explore topics like this. His reasons are partly political, as he explains in the introduction to the volume in which these two essays were later collected:
The people who must never have power are the humourless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity. Since an essential element of the American idea is its variety, I have tried to celebrate things that are amusing for their own sake, or ridiculous but revealing, or simply of intrinsic interest. All of the above might apply to the subject of my little essay on the art and science of the blowjob, for example.
There we have it: comic detours are integral to Hitchens’ worldview. He saw venturing into the absurd and the vulgar as an essential tool—both for mocking the pious and narrow-minded, and for celebrating the wonderful variety of American life (and human life in general). And he saw both this mockery and this celebration as essential weapons in the fight against dogmatists and puritans.
The Makeover
The apotheosis of Hitchens’ comic writing is perhaps a series of three essays he wrote for Vanity Fair between 2007 and 2008, in which he reflects on a “self-improvement” programme he’d agreed to undergo—as he explains, for the sake of colleagues who’d told him that “they would pay good money to stop having to look at me in my current shape.” (Also enjoyable are the bizarre pictures that accompany the online versions of these essays.)
Hitchens begins the first of these essays with a parody of an official third-person report, detailing with comedic exaggeration all his physical flaws—as well as one positive attribute: his “extraordinary genital endowment.” The fictional report closes with this observation:
At all times, the subject gives off a scent that resembles that of an illegal assembly, either of people or of materials, in the hog wallows of Tennessee or in the more remote and primitive islands of Scotland. He becomes defensive, and sometimes aggressive, when asked about the source of this effluvium. It is considered by me, and by the rest of this committee, and by the subject’s few remaining friends and surviving family, a medical mystery that he can still perform what he persists in referring to as his “job.”
The essay continues with Hitchens’ response to the report: “This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?” Then, for the rest of the essay, and throughout the next two, Hitchens takes us with him as he undergoes cosmetic dental surgery, tries to stop smoking, heads to the gym and goes on various other self-improvement quests. The result is some of the best comic writing I’ve ever encountered. For example, here is Hitchens describing what it’s like to be given a sack, back and crack at a salon:
Here’s what happens. You have to spread your knees as far apart as they will go, while keeping your feet together. In this “wide stance” position, which is disconcertingly like waiting to have your Pampers changed, you are painted with hot wax, to which strips are successively attached and then torn away. Not once, but many, many times. I had no idea it would be so excruciating. The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper hand job. The thing is that, in order to rip, you have to grip. A point of leverage is required: a place that can be firmly gripped and pulled while the skin is tautened …
The businesslike Senhora Padilha [the beautician] daubed away, took a purchase on the only available handhold, and then wrenched and wrenched again. The impression of being a huge baby was enhanced by the blizzards of talcum powder that followed each searing application. I swear that several times she soothingly said that I was being a brave little boy … Meanwhile, everything in the general area was fighting to retract itself inside my body.
These comic essays are also full of keen philosophical observations about the so-called self-improvement industry. For example, Hitchens shares the conflicting thoughts he has as he undergoes the various programmes. On the one hand, he believes that “it’s a mistake to try to look younger than one is … The face in particular ought to be the register of a properly lived life.” On the other hand, he notes that mastery over one’s body can be beneficial: “Who was to be boss here?”
Although he reports some improvement to his health, his feelings about the process are mixed. At the end of the second essay, he writes: “As I look back on my long and arduous struggle to make myself over, and on my dismaying recent glimpses of lost babyhood, I am more than ever sure that it’s enough to be born once, and to take one’s chances, and to grow old disgracefully.” And, at the end of the third essay, he gives the process a decidedly half-hearted endorsement: “Overall verdict: some of this you can try at home and some of it you certainly should.”
Encore? If Only!
That third essay was published in 2008, just three years before Hitchens’ death from oesophageal cancer. So it can be poignant to read now, in his summary of the results of his efforts, that he believes his life expectancy has been “presumably somewhat increased, but who’s to say?” Alas, if only his life expectancy had been increased! Not only for his own sake, and that of his family and friends, but also for the sake of his audience, who might then have had many more comic essays to enjoy.
As well as being a pugilist of the highest order and a controversialist over whom we will no doubt continue to argue, he made an indelible contribution to the comic literature of America and, indeed, the English language. And this contribution was tied to his deepest convictions, rather than being a mere distraction from more serious work. Even though Hitchens died too young, we can take heart in the fact that he left us with a huge amount of material—written and spoken—to appreciate, whether for the first time or the hundredth. So if you find yourself lamenting the loss of his voice, remember that you can always head back into the deep mine that is the work of Christopher Hitchens. One of his favourite mottos was littera scripta manet (“the written word endures”). And so it does—so it does.
