About the Author (Except Not Really (Well, a Little Bit (Somewhere at the End (It Should Be Pretty Apparent (I Mean, It’ll Still Be a Bunch of Smartass Bullshit, But It’ll Have At Least a Kernel of Truth, Y’Know? (Which Is Realistically the Most We Can Hope For At This Point (This Title Has Officially Crossed the Line of Parenthetical Abuse and Will Be Duly Reported to the Commissar…Make with the Closers)))))))

(Bio compiled by Professor Devotion)

Marxo Grouch was born in Nineteen Hundred and Seventy, Year of Jack Lord, on the island of Manhattan. And yet he has never drunk a Manhattan. Why is that?

He established his reputation as a critic of dubious ethics early on in a review for his high school newspaper, The Carbuncle, of the drama club’s production of ‘Spring’s Awakening,’ in which he lambasted the lead actress for her work in a scene that it turned out had been excised for this particular production. He was later forced to admit publicly, and pantslessly, that he had in fact spent a good portion of the performance in the bathroom beating off to a yearbook photo of the afore-mentioned actress with a cut-out of his own head over that of her quarterback boyfriend. (Nota bene: Contrary to rumors, his involvement in said boyfriend’s complete subsequent loss of body hair has never been proven.)

He continued his higher education at the St. Peteawhack Academy for the Deceptively Lazy, and there fostered his ongoing love of making lists of seemingly arbitrary words. One of the best of these (‘1. Cheesecake 2. Parapet 3. Moron 4. Fermented 5. Gangrenous 6. Tit-sling 7. Whoops’) is currently hanging in the Neue Gallery in New York. Taped to the back of a fire extinguisher on the 3rd floor.

In the early ‘90s, as part of an ongoing study of the parameters of psychedelic art, Mr. Grouch, under the name of The Really, Very, Truly Reverend Denton X. Q. Mazda, seceded from the United States along with a number of fellow outpatients, among them Dr. Androcles T. H. C. Drofruh and Professor Robert Merry Christmas, to form the glorious, free-floating nation of Eunice. Conceived as a way of killing time until the snack bar opened for dinner, the neo-nationalist fervor soon spread like eczema to the far corners of the quad. A debate immediately ensued as to what qualities should embody their national stereotype, a counterpart to Germany’s stoic efficiency, France’s snooty estheticism, America’s loud, arrogant anti-intellectualism, etc. They finally settled on the seemingly unlikely twin set of delirious melancholy and perpetual arousal, the former because they liked the way it sounded and the latter because it was true. Upon reaching that decision it was time for grilled cheese with bacon and tomato for everyone. Fiercely loyal on the inside, casually indifferent on the outside, the citizens of Eunice have since drifted to all parts of the world. You may very well have rented a video from one today.

More recently, Mr. Grouch has devoted his time to trying to popularize the zither as a heavy metal instrument, stalking Naomi Watts, doing what he can for Charity (until she broke it off, then it was back to shaking hands with the vicar), inventing recipes that utilize extraterrestrial ingredients, staying regular (if not normal), and penning a burlesque show filled with striptease and pie-throwing, patterned after the Ring Cycle.

FUN FACTS ABOUT THE GROUCH:

Never having cared much for his birth name, he has been known to adopt the moniker Marc Beschler, largely for use in posting on message boards dedicated to erotic macramé. This name is a bastardization of a phrase from the language of a lost Amazonian tribe meaning, “This crocodile has not been properly cooked.”

Endowed by nature with perhaps the most glorious baritone voice to be heard on the American stage, he has also been known to lift entire jokes from Tom Lehrer, following them with jokes that only diehard Tom Lehrer fans will understand. He charmingly blames this for his outsider status, ignoring the real problem.

Mr. Grouch is one of only two people on the planet who know what the letters in the anagram CAEU (pronounced like it’s spelled) stand for. And actually he’s forgotten the ‘U’ and isn’t 100% sure on the ‘E’. Come to think of it, it’s been so long since he’s talked to the other guy, it’s entirely possible that he, too, has forgotten it. You know what, just…forget it.

He considers his crowning achievement as a critic to be the time in Montmarte that he got into a girly slapfight with Jean-Luc Godard when he dared to confront the oh-tuhr, demanding to know whether it was in fact two things or three. It was at that moment he determined that obscure art film jokes were the way to keep people COMING BACK FOR MORE!

Reviewing this bio I see that precious little of it is actually true, even some of the parts that are, though the part about being born in Manhattan and never having drunk one is. And incidentally, I’m still waiting for an explanation as to why.





Anybody?





Tch. You people are useless.

To add a degree of authenticity to this I guess I should mention that Mr. Grouch enjoys: beer; hardcore punk; the grand old city of New York; zombie flicks; art deco; stewed greens; large breasts, both real and otherwise (in your face, Chuckles); Bosch and Breughel the Elder; beautiful women in slapstick situations; lemon Coke; psychotic felines; film noir; the sound of light traffic gliding along the avenue (bonus points if it’s in the rain); the haunted island of Nantucket; punk rock chicks; horseradish; singing in harmony; people with a well tuned sense of their own epicurean and aesthetic tastes who yet manage to avoid snobbery (he said, somewhat snobbishly); selected prog rock; sour cream; surrealism and/or absurdism; pulp novels, preferably printed on real pulp; getting, but not giving (that’s right, I said it); long late night walks with some good music, a deli beer and having a little laugh; whistling; olfactory-induced memories; black velvet; harmonizing; German/Austrian expressionism; big band; women in garters; a really good sandwich; you know, I could go on like this for a long, long time, so to preserve a bit of mystery, I’ll just stop now.
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Professor Devotion is the author of Camembert Conspiracies, The Adventures of Captain Motherfucker, and Shaving Your Inner Armpit, as well as the legendary series of articles featured in Melted Gazebo Magazine, “Doesn’t That Go Over There?”, about the infamous Sutton Place feng shui scandals. The Professor enjoys Venezuelan cuisine, Stuart Kaminsky novels, starting flame wars, and hiccupping.




Mr. Grouch (right) cracking up a local celebrity. Yep. Obscure art film jokes. Works every time.