In an interview on AskMen.com, Tucker Max clung to his dwindling relevance by blaming the failure of the movie I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell on other people, comparing himself favorably to Dane Cook, and touting the film’s successes in Tempe, Ariz. Of course that’s the last bastion of Tucker Max supporters. Tucker Max was made for Tempe!

Max on his Tempe celebrity:

We had a $10,000 or $15,000 per screen average in New York City. It did great! Then, like, Tempe, $10,000. Then we open it up in a place like Carbondale, and I’m like: “Why are you guys opening in Carbondale? Oh, it’s Southern Illinois — they like you.” They just don’t know the f*cking movies! They don’t get first-run movies, so of course it has, like, a $500 per screen average there and it looks like… F*ck, dude, it was so frustrating on so many levels. [sighs] That’s something I would’ve done different.

So, either the folks of Carbondale, Ill. don’t understand “fucking movies,” or they don’t understand the fucking movies of Tucker Max. How could they? Max’s subdued humor is fine-tuned to the delicate aesthetics of Tempe, Ariz., a town that (in addition to being my hometown), hosts Arizona State University. ASU, for the uninitiated, is the state’s most prestigious center of higher beer bongs, and the school the Daily Show crowned the “The Harvard of Date Rape.”

Coincidence? I think not. That leaves us only to tidy up the film’s apparent success in New York City: Here’s my theory.