Wanna know why Joe Queenan’s so mean? His Dad was a nasty drunk. And they lived in the projects! What a salve that must be for the stars he has so relentlessly skewered over the years. 

Queenan attempts to come to grips with his father’s legacy in “Closing Time,” but refuses to forgive him or apologize for his own nasty streak. Mostly he piles on the punishing details, describing in graphic detail his father’s beatings and his mother’s apparent indifference. And let’s not forget the family’s shameful slide into poverty in 1950s Philadelphia. 

“No afterglow accompanies these experiences,” Queenan writes a couple chapters in. “Nothing good ever came out of living in that project. One might argue that the degrading experience of poverty taught me to be ambitious and self-sufficient, but it would be more accurate to say that it taught me to be ruthless and cruel, indifferent to other people’s feelings, particularly if I was writing about them.” 

Pretty insightful. But Queenan immediately pivots blame on Hollywood for romanticizing the poor. It’s up to the reader to connect the dots between his previously stated impatience with the supposed problems of the non-poor and his evisceration of indulged Hollywood stars.

How cruel can he be? Sony was so outraged by Queenan’s vicious early 1990s takedown of Barbra Streisand that it threatened to withhold advertising from Movieline for a year. This pleased the editors tremendously — oh, how they cackled when the publisher told them about it — but I could see Sony’s point. Parts of “Sacred Cow” may have been wickedly funny but the article was undeniably mean. Queenan specialized in such pieces for the mag, then in its heyday of snarkiness, and has made a tidy sum wielding his poison pen for a series of major publications over the years, as he reminds us more than once in his memoir.

And to think he seriously considered entering the priesthood! But hey, there’s more money in sarcasm. 

Queenan does have a nice eye for telling detail: He vividly evokes Philadelphia’s modest Quaker-infused ethos, and the clannishness of its Irish Catholic enclaves in those eras, some of which overlap my stints in the city and its suburbs. The names were familiar, if not the particulars. 

Alas, Queenan’s wicked wit is mostly absent in “Closing Time”; he’s too focused on chronicling the horrors he survived. It’s too bad he couldn’t have taken the page out of much younger Mexican-American satirist Gustavo Arellano’s recent memoir cum history, “Orange County.” Arellano’s father also battled the bottle, albeit more successfully than Queenan’s dad, and his family also lived in wretched housing, but the twentysomething scribe does not hold a grudge at his family, preferring to lampoon the county’s racist past and present.  

What would a younger, snarkier Joe make of his brutalizing march through the past? Hard to say. It’s also unclear whether Queenan successfully exorcised his demons with this tome; he admits that incidents from his past haunt him still, citing “beatings, lies, gruesome dental experiences, hijacked piggy banks, being sent to bed on an empty stomach.” Fortunately, the epilogue offers a brief ray of hope that, some 10 years after his father died, he’s found some peace through a satisfactory relationship with his own children. 

So maybe the cycle won’t repeat itself.