HOW TO PISS IN PUBLIC

Calling all Tucker Max fans: McInnes (Street Boners: 1,764 Hipster Fashion Jokes, 2010, etc.) delivers a monumentally unfunny memoir of being a jerk.

The author was born and raised in a boring town in Canada, the son of two “bombastic drunk Scots.” There he engaged in typical teenage hijinks like dropping acid and figuring out who could drive the drunkest. Seeing promise in such pursuits, he soon became a mainstay of the regional punk scene, forming the band Anal Chinook, and drinking, puking and having lots of sex. University led him to Montreal and his eventual founding of the magazine Vice. When the magazine became an international hit, McInnes sold it for a large sum of money. However, the book isn’t as much a linear narrative as a pastiche of the author’s many outrageous experiences. First and foremost is sex with “bitches”—or as McInnes writes, “[people] you jerk off into.” In one bit of debauchery he nearly pushed a woman’s head into the toilet while having sex with her. Then there’s the time he gave himself an STD by swallowing his own semen. Another time he pretended to be a “retard,” and people actually believed he was retarded and treated him with kindness. There are plenty of stories about drinking and fighting, and he even got beat up by a “faggot.” Occasionally there’s a story that is actually funny (the time his mother got stoned) or poignant (being in New York during 9/11). But while the author pictures himself a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson, there’s a thick line between Thompson’s inspired lunacy and the insipid callousness offered here. McInnes did eventually settle down, however, and got married; in marriage, he writes, “women become human beings for the first time ever.” Inspiring stuff.

A humor book far more mean than funny.