Joe Queenan: My Goodness: A Cynic's Short-Lived Search For Sainthood

Over a 12-year period, in numerous books and in publications such as Spy, the Guardian, and Rolling Stone, humorist Joe Queenan confesses to writing roughly 889 stories in which he gratuitously insulted celebrities and other public figures, many of whom are, in his back-handed estimation, "unquestionably good." All told, he counts "47,678 nasty remarks, or one cruel remark every two sentences." Struck by a crisis of conscience that seems largely unconvincing, to put it mildly, the prolific hatchet man describes a six-month effort to change his ways in the intermittently hilarious My Goodness. Like Queenan's Red Lobster, White Trash, And The Blue Lagoon, for which he spent a year plumbing the lower depths of American pop culture, the book is a headlong immersion into something he loathes, namely, the self-righteous practice of trumpeting your own philanthropy. In that vein, he follows the precedent set by Jimmy Carter, Susan Sarandon, Ben & Jerry, and Sting in a daily struggle to curb his natural viciousness and do something positive—within reason and budget—for humanity. It's an exercise choked with irony, since Queenan is basically infiltrating this world in order to find new, arguably nastier, things to say about it. Presuming he's even capable of earnestness, he's terrible at feigning it. But My Goodness frequently hits its satirical targets, if only because the author takes so many shots. The funniest chapter finds him desperately overhauling his lifestyle, replacing his "morally neutral" checkbook with a pro-breastfeeding line, switching credit cards (to the conspicuous Amnesty International Platinum Plus) and long-distance service (Working Assets), and buying every message-bearing T-shirt, bumper sticker, and button he can find. He then takes the slogan, "Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty" and turns it into a mantra, with a special emphasis on "random" and "senseless." But other than Mr. Sanjay Krishnaswamy of Somerville, Massachusetts, who gets an unexpected copy of a rare Elvis Costello CD, humankind doesn't benefit much from his efforts. For Queenan, being good is a nice experiment, but it'll never take.