IT’A A DAMP AFTERNOON in Manhattan. In fact, it’s pouring—the type of rain that shows no signs of letting up and has vendors out on street corners selling umbrellas. Philadelphia native Joe Queenan makes his way down Eighty-second Street, stops at the steps to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and without saying hello, explains his late arrival: “I missed my train.” 

As an author of eight books, who also writes 80 to 100 articles a year for publications such as GQ and the New York Times, Queenan is constantly struggling with a never-ending to-do list. Missing his train doesn’t help matters. His original plan was to discuss writing over lunch, then wrap things up in time to get an allergy shot, but now he has to make a choice. 

He’s a man who’s described himself as both a “full time son of a bitch” and a “sneering churl,” so it’s surprising when, partway through lunch and pressed for time, he calls the doctor’s office to reschedule.

A few minutes after he hangs up, Queenan settles back onto the topic of writing and explains a reluctance he feels when working on certain articles: “When I’m doing a story and it involves interacting with people, I wait until the very, very last minute. Because it’s never easy to be a jerk.” 

He pauses, then says, “But you just say, ‘Okay, today I’m going to be a jerk all day long. So let’s do it. Put on your game face.”

Queenan’s game face is one of the best in the business and has earned him a solid reputation for skewering his subjects unmercifully. Take, for instance, his book Red Lobster, White Trash, & the Blue Lagoon, in which he documents an 18-month journey into the heart of American popular culture. In a particularly trenchant chapter, he takes aim at mainstream authors:

Another trend I noticed while slowly working my way through the Masters of Bilge cannon was that bad writers like to preface their books with a quote from someone classy….

…Stephen Coonts christens his Flight of the Intruder with a citation from Ovid, and Stephen King ushers readers into The Shining with quotes from Francisco de Goya and Edgar Allan Poe.

This made me wonder why great writers didn’t start their books with quotations from world-class hacks. Wouldn’t it be fun to open a reissue of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and find this on the opening page:

“His eyes drank her like wine, and she looked up at him with a small smile.”

—Danielle Steel

Throughout lunch, Quennan taps into this more acerbic side. With a straight face and matter-of-fact tone, he addresses topics such as the sophistication of NASCAR fans and how Scott McClellan isn’t half the liar Ari Fleischer was. 

But when the topic changes to his development as a writer—how he learned from his favorite artists—it becomes clear that for all of his work’s ethos and opinion, he also maintains a strong commitment to style. “When you write humorous material,” he says “people don’t really notice the craft of your writing. They just say, ‘It sounds like the way you talk.’ But,” he insists, “it’s totally different.” 

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BORN IN 1950, Queenan spent much of his childhood growing up in an East Falls housing project, which, he’s said, had a strong influence on his attitude. He always knew he wanted to be a writer, but believed he should wait until he had something to write about. (Once, when asked what advice he’d give young writers, he told an interviewer, “Do not write anything until you are 30, as you will have absolutely nothing to say.”) As a result, he never wrote for his high school or college newspapers. Instead he spent his time reading and rewriting stories about characters like Robin Hood, Joan of Arc, and Achilles. 

His only notable early success came when he entered and won a city-wide essay contest at age 12. The topic of his essay: “Why the Catholic Church Should Not Get Rid of Latin”—an opinion he still defends. 

“I believed that if you got rid of Latin and brought in guitars and all that crap, it would just wreck the church, and I was absolutely right…. The thing about a Latin mass is that the priests had this mysterious mumbo jumbo. And then once the priests started speaking in English, they sounded like Protestant priests, and Protestant priests sound like insurance salesmen.”

As he got older, his practice of rewriting stories developed into a method of study. He would underline sentences written by authors he liked and then write them into notebooks. “When you write those things out,” he says, “you’re learning to write. You’re learning the writer’s rhythm. That’s why I tell writers to read and read and read. And you winnow out the ones you don’t want to be like.”

Queenan gravitated toward the “over-the-top, overly expressive” style of writers like Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. With this preference, he developed an almost formulaic style that he still stands firmly behind: “I often start with some absurd premise,” he says. “Then two-thirds of the way down, I say, ‘Far be it for me to suggest….’ I use that structure in every story, and I’m aware that I do that. I’m also aware of certain phrasings that I like. For example, I like double modifiers like ‘preposterously hideous,’ or ‘refreshingly insane.’ A lot of people don’t like that. I don’t care.”

His editor at Henry Holt once gave him a book by a writer with a completely different style. He remembers, “It was very stark, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Finally, I asked, ‘What was it about that book?’ She said, ‘It didn’t have any adverbs.’  I could write like that,” he says. “But you write the way you like because you like it. It’s not that you’re unaware of other ways.” 

In defense of his repeated use of the same structure, he says, “Moliere used the same plot every single play, but he had different jokes.”

Queenan frequently brings up the names of history’s classic writers. He feels strongly about the importance of these artists and writes in the prologue of Malcontents (Running Press, 2002), “I was overjoyed to undertake the project, because it would give me a chance to reread Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Twain, Saki, Pope, Moliere, and the rest of my boyhood heroes.” Many of these writers were introduced to him by professors at St. Joseph’s University: Thomas Donahue, who still teaches French, and John Mullen who taught English and to whom Malcontents was dedicated.

Of course, Queenan still subjects celebrated authors to the same cutting scrutiny that he applies to everybody else. For instance, he doesn’t think twice about mentioning that Hemingway “was never any good” after The Sun Also Rises, and that A Moveable Feast is a great book because “it’s a writer who can no longer write but is cranking it up for one last time at bat.”  

Queenan gets particularly enthusiastic when he brings up Oscar Wilde: “Oscar Wilde,” he says, “is a perfect example of how, if you’re really good with words, you can say the stupidest stuff and it sounds good. Take the quote, ‘The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,’ ” he says, and pauses, almost smiles. “No! There’s a million things worse than not being talked about. Like going to jail for two years for being a sodomist; like losing your whole career; like never seeing your children again. There’s a million things. You read these things and you’re like, Yeah, yeah…that sounds really smart. And then you think about it.”

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WHILE QUEENAN HAS PROVED he’s capable of using his wit to deride almost anything he sets his sights on, he frequently chooses not to. Taste and common sense are his standards, and he makes sure to call a fair game. In Red Lobster, White Trash, & The Blue Lagoon, he notes that, of all people, Barry Manilow “proved to be an enormously likable, self-effacing, ingratiating entertainer.” 

Similarly, if Queenan sets out to do a piece and finds that his subject doesn’t deserve the abuse, he won’t do it. “I wanted to do a story about what a joke religion was,” he recalls. “I went to an Episcopalian church where they were having the blessing of the animals. They were blessing ferrets and iguanas. I talked to some of the priests, and then talked to a priest at a Lutheran Church over on the West Forties. He still had a Lutheran Church, even though there’s like three Lutherans left in New York. But they had this AIDS soup kitchen there and this AIDS center. [I realized] even when these guys are ridiculous—when they’re doing the guitar face and everything—they’re still basically better than us. Their hearts are in the right place. Their clothes are bad; their hair is bad; their guitars are bad; the hugging is bad, but they’re trying to help people. So I didn’t want to do the story. I just figured: Kill it.”

He advises, “If you get an assignment and you get even a tiny inkling that you don’t want to do it, don’t do it.” Queenan had to learn that lesson the hard way. “When I started out,” he says, “I would get one story a year that would wreck my life.” 

Early in his career Queenan edited direct-mail newspapers, and then, after five years, began writing Op-Ed pieces for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He later became a staff writer—first at Forbes and then Barron’s—but hated life as a staffer because it conflicted with his philosophy “If it’s sunny, don’t work.”

These days he prefers to complain about the self-employed lifestyle: “It’s very hard to organize your time because they keep inventing new technologies to annoy you. You get 30 e-mails a day and people want you to respond to them and it drives you up the wall.”

Queenan also points out that staff writers and freelancers take different approaches to the way they work: “If you’re on a staff, you can spend three months working on a story. Like these New Yorker guys. All the stories in the New Yorker are twice as long as they need to be. It’s like, Get an editor in there. I saw a story a few weeks ago about Lyle Lovett talking about his hat [March 1, 2004, “Homeboy: Why Lyle Lovett Stays in Texas.”]. That kind of languid pace—that’s the stuff that staff writers always do. The meter isn’t running, so they’re like, ‘Let’s have Lyle talk about his hat some more.’ If you’re a freelancer, you’re like, ‘With all due respect, Lyle, I really don’t care where you got your hat. Just tell me about the music.”

This economy also applies to his theories about production. “I never do a second draft,” he says. “Bob Dylan had the thing: Two takes. If it doesn’t work, don’t record it. I feel the same way. You write a story and somebody says, ‘Okay we need to cut this,’ and then if it doesn’t work after that, just kill it. I don’t want to do it.”

For many, a lack of editing and rewriting can be disastrous, but for Queenan it seems to work. About his contribution to Malcontents, Jennifer Worick, former editorial director at Running Press, says he provided a “hilarious introduction that needed no editing at all.”

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WHILE HE HAS WRITTEN for publications such as GQ, Men’s Health, Smart Money, and Playboy, Queenan says he doesn’t like to read magazines. He’ll go through them if he’s going to a party where he knows he’ll run into other writers, but believes that you don’t get ideas from them. Instead he prefers to read newspapers, of which he’ll read five a day, six days a week, taking Sundays off. “Newspapers,” he says, “are written on the fly, so there’s so much undigested information. That’s where you get story ideas. There’s so many times I read a newspaper article and say, ‘Oh, I can use that.’ ” 

Of course, much of the material he knows the daily media sources will get to first. “If you saw it,” he says, “Conan O’Brien saw it, Leno saw it, Letterman saw it. So it’s not the kind of stuff you can use.” 

With this in mind, he searches for less-obvious material, literally reading the papers cover to cover. He’s hesitant to write pieces based on current topics because “after a week they cease to be funny.” Instead he tries to create stories that are general and to which everyone can relate. 

For example, in a piece he wrote for the New York Times (April 11, 2004, “Hey, Buddy, You’re Fired!”), Queenan spun an original idea from the success of Donald Trump’s television show. He opens the story: “The popularity of NBC’s hit reality show ‘The Apprentice’ derives at least in part from the thrill of watching Donald Trump fire an inept contestant each week. By heartlessly showing the assorted Heidis, Troys and Katrinas the door, Mr. Trump—that essence of the cold-blooded New York executive—is effectively saying: ‘You have failed me. You do not have what it takes to succeed. The quality of my life will be immeasurably improved once you are no longer a part of it. Even with this hair.’ ”

He then segues into a more timeless idea: “Have we not all dreamed of being in a position to fire someone from our lives? Especially in New York, where it seems more people deserve to be fired than in any other city in the world? No, not something as humdrum and judicially defensible as firing someone from a job, but telling those annoying, mean-spirited or incompetent people we deal with every day that we no longer require their services and would prefer that they exit our lives forever.”

Of this article he says: “Most of the time when you talk to people about a story, they hem and haw. With this, I called somebody and told them that I was writing a story about who you would fire from your personal life, and they would go, ‘Everyone from Moishe’s bakery.’ It was like they were waiting by the phone for you to call. Everyone immediately responded to that one.”

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IN ADDITION TO his intense newspaper regiment, Queenan toggles between ten to fifteen books at a time. Currently, he says, “I’m reading about Cortez and the conquest of Mexico, and then I’m reading about six novels, and I’m halfway through four books about jazz and opera.”

While he claims that his book reading is “mostly for personal knowledge,” it tends to mirror the topics he hopes to write about in the future (art and music). Frequently, he mentions a new book that he has finished but “is not anywhere near being published.” The book, “Queenan Country,” is about his relationship with the British, which is primarily the result of his marriage to a British woman. Consistent with his past work, it promises to present insights that both critique and praise. Of the British, he says, they’re “annoying, cheap, and lacking in passion,” but also “more interesting than Americans” because their strangeness doesn’t get expressed through material items. “Americans express eccentricity through something dumb in their backyard, or a stupid car,” he says. “But in England it channels into your personality.”

When asked how he manages to do all this work and stay sane, he replies, “I don’t think I am sane. It’s always out of control, and you just hope you get caught up.” Then he admits, “There’s just times when you have to say, ‘I’m just not going to be able to do this.’” 

After lunch, he zips up his jacket and heads back out into the rain—perhaps thinking of how much he has to do before leaving for London that Friday; which train he’ll be able to catch home, or when he’ll be able to work in that shot.