As America's "cynic laureate," satirist Joe Queenan routinely immerses himself in the worst of US popular entertainment. For months on end he becomes a cultural bottom feeder. Then he surfaces - to deliver scathing commentaries on Streisand movies, New Age music, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Garth Brooks, Riverdance and other products he detests as essentially fake.
But even Queenan cannot face Angela's Ashes. "I'll never see that movie," he declares from his office in New York. "Frank McCourt is a whiney old f***. Flann O'Brien would have walked all over him." (O'Brien, along with George Orwell, is deeply revered by Queenan.)
The attack on McCourt is not the response of a self-hating Irish-American, to use the therapeutic jargon that Queenan loathes. While never parading his father's Cork ancestry, Queenan readily proclaims his heritage, particularly when Riverdance fans, for example, accuse him of snobbery. "I grew up in Philadelphia in a very poor neighbourhood," he recalls. "The housing project was so bad that they just blew it up. I didn't go to private school. This isn't a class thing."
A product of Catholic schools and colleges, Queenan did not - and does not - feel particularly Irish-American, although he identifies the Irish element in his irreverent humour. "It's not just the quick wit and the love of language," he observes, "It's the complete and utter contempt for authority. It's the irresistible urge to piss off the three people who can best advance your career."
Queenan, however, has profited handsomely from his intolerance. A contributing editor at GQ and Movieline magazine and the author of five books, he has written for most major newspapers and magazines in the US. Queenan also made three short films for Channel 4 - Mickey Rourke for a Day, Hugh Grant for a Day, So You Wanna Be a Gangster - and hosted BBC Radio's Postcard From Gotham.
Over the years, this large, engaging man has become the literary equivalent of a method actor, living with his victims. To write Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon, for instance, the writer spent a year sampling what he assessed as the worst that America could throw at him. His trials included seeing Cats; reading The Bridges of Madison County; attending Kenny G and Barry Manilow concerts; eating fake Italian food. "I was interested in the grappa of American life, the sediment," he explains. "Things that were insanely popular and also insanely bad." "Any paragraph in The Bridges of Madison County is some of the worst writing ever," he insists.
In the recently published Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, Queenan chronicles his experiences as a movie critic who lives the part. For one month, the writer impersonated the loud idiot sitting behind you in the cinema, shouting things like "Remember Pearl Harbour" at sensitive Japanese films, just to see what he provoked. In atonement, he became The Bad Movie Angel, refunding money nightly to disappointed viewers emerging from horrible films. Queenan plunged into the icy Atlantic to prove that Leonardo DiCaprio could not have talked as much as he did at the end of Titanic. These stunts may sound adolescent, but Queenan takes movies - and most entertainment - seriously.
"The worst thing that I remember about being poor is not the things we couldn't afford," he recalls. "It was just the grinding stupidity you came up against the whole time. To escape that my father took me to the movies. Some were bad, a lot were good. But even then the difference seemed important." Lamenting not the fact that people want to escape, but that the escape routes they choose are so shoddy, Queenan agrees with a point once made by William Burroughs: It is far easier to degrade your customer than it is to improve your product. Burroughs was referring to heroin dealers but, in Queenan's view, the principle applies equally well to popular culture.
Take The Brothers McMullen: "Watching this movie for almost two hours is like having the entire St Patrick's Day Parade rumble through your medulla oblongata . . . Well, maybe not those Irish lesbians . . . " Or Mighty Aphrodite: "Watching Woody Allen kiss Mira Sorvino is like watching Benny Hill kiss anybody." Or Cujo: " . . . set in Maine where people don't get out often enough, and even when they do, they're still in Maine". Queenan rechristens Far and Away "Top o' the Mornin' Gun" and considers a new Streisand production to be "the scariest thing since the Ebola virus, the Second Battle of the Marne, or Streisand's last film".
Queenan's latest satirical outburst - My Goodness: A Cynic's Shortlived Search for Sainthood - finds the penitent writer in eco-friendly, New Age territory, pursuing virtue. "The one thing I had learned over the years from observing the Susan Sarandons and Ben & Jerrys of the world was that there was no point in being a wonderful person unless everyone else knew about it."
To that end, he began to make charitable donations on cheques made out of recycled soy, to champion the whales, the rain forest, the Dalai Lama. He even sent a food parcel to Linda Tripp. "I got a fund-raising letter from her in which she complained about not being able to go grocery shopping in public," he recalls. "That was the most `random' act of kindness of them all, because I went out of my way to be nice to a Republican, or at least a Republican-like person, and Republicans, we all know, are tools of Satan."
Disillusioned with sanctity and reconciled with his inner viper, he still responds viscerally to the recognisably Celtic theme from the film Titanic. "This Irish stuff has got to stop," he insists. "The pipes, the whistles, the guys in frilly shirts. No Irish person I know is like that. They're more like New York cops."
Universal good taste would, of course be the end of Joe Queenan. Without Angela's Ashes, after all, he could not have written his parody for GQ, Angeligue's Ashes, in which a lugubrious author describes his miserable childhood in Antwerp. On a more serious level, he laments the current taste for "literature as sociology" and rejects the ethnic categorisation of writers and readers. "If I'm Irish I should read McCourt. If I'm Jewish I should read Elie Wiesel. But what if I just want to read Flaubert? Can't we just stick with the best?" It is a heartfelt plea from an unrepentant joker.
My Goodness: A Cynic's Shortlived Seach for Sainthood, published in the US by Hyperion, $21.95, can be ordered from Irish bookshops or Internet booksellers. ISBN: 0786865539
Winging It returns next week.