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Musings on The Naked Trucker

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By Jeff Abernathy

We never have a slow news day in the academic-affairs office. Just yesterday a PR officer called to let me know that the local paper was running a major feature on an alumnus who has recently gained prominence in his field.

Great news, I said. Who's the alum?

An English major, came the reply. (Ah, my own discipline, at least the cultural studies end of it, back when I had discipline for anything other than meetings and paper shuffling). A creative soul who has struggled through the years and now established a national reputation as an actor, writer, and producer in Hollywood.

My colleague promised to come right over with the story.

My heart soared. As a faculty member at a liberal-arts college, I had always been gratified to see our alumni go on to great achievements. Faculty members at Augustana prepare students to make rich contributions as servants and leaders in their communities: professors guide students in their choices in life, lead students in study across the globe, and involve them in research published in important journals.

With my colleagues in English, I take particular pride in the accomplishments of the Ph.D.'s, writers, and executives who are our graduates: Years of studying Shakespeare, Austen, and Faulkner result in the refined, cultured graduates who make us proud.

These days, as a dean, that sense of pride in alumni achievements is most often accompanied by ambition. So as I contemplated our graduate's success -- perhaps he's having a successful run in, say, a new intepretation of Lear -- I also mused over the fund-raising potential of the work.

Then my colleague from public relations dropped the newspaper article on my desk: The headline read, "Augustana Grad Stars on TV as The Naked Trucker."

Sigh. There are limits to a dean's enthusiasms. A photo on the front page pictured two men. A balding man on the right wears a "Yukon Jack" T-shirt and jeans. He's standing next to a man wearing nothing but a cap, a pair of boots, and a strategically placed guitar.

Our alumnus is the one with the guitar.

David Allen, Augustana College Class of 1980, is both star and executive producer of The Naked Trucker & T-Bones, a sitcom that started in January on Comedy Central. Readers who watch The Daily Show may have noticed the network's heavy promotional efforts.

The Naked Trucker's plot is not Aristotelian: Allen plays the trucker, driving, and, ostensibly, living in the buff. His partner is Gerald "T-Bones" Tibbons, a would-be philosopher who is otherwise a drunken drifter. Suffice it to say that the audience for these fortysomethings appears to be teenaged boys and cultural-studies theorists, with the general range of humor of the animated screed Southpark.

Which is to say that the Naked Trucker and T-Bones make sex and drugs their leitmotif.

The act's signature song is "My American Dream" -- think John Prine meets Harry Crews -- wherein the more salient experiences of Americana include "drinking Crazy Horse malt liquor in the parking lot of Disneyland" and "peeking through the window at a neighbor in the tub without them calling the cops again." The pair celebrate an America "where you're free to smoke a bowl while you're smoking a Virginia ham."

For all of the questionable publicity likely to come Augustana's way as a result of the show, I take solace that Allen's work has inspired critics to historical and literary metaphors. That, surely, follows from his knowing allusions, steeped as they are in the liberal arts. One critic notes that "the Naked Trucker and T-Bones are the Lewis and Clark of the digital age." And another admiringly cites references to "Chaucer, Noam Chomsky, and the proper operation of big rigs."

Naturally I am impressed with Allen's achievement on one level. The creative accomplishments -- including work for Saturday Night Live and a host of sitcoms as well as years on the comedy circuit -- that led him to become the Naked Trucker no doubt started flowing in an Augustana dorm room, albeit one with a towel rolled up at the bottom of the door. And he no doubt encountered the writers to whom he regularly alludes in Augustana classrooms.

Still, I keep wondering how to translate the act -- six-string cover-up and all (we're all glad he doesn't play violin) -- into a proud statement of achievement that I can pass along to the Augustana community or, failing that, into development support?

Both are problematic. For some in our community, Allen would have to quote the whole of "The Wife of Bath" in Middle English to make up for the japes about sex in truck-stop bathrooms. And the only alumni likely to donate to the college in order to encourage more work like this would be those who find in his performance a Saussurian reading of petit-bourgeois culture, rich with semiotic irony, a performance artist's update on Roland Barthes' hermeneutics of wrestling.

In other words, academics. How the development office would laugh at that.

Am I just being a tweedy snob with my first-blush reaction to Allen's act? It's likely true what Richard Russo writes, that a liberal-arts dean in a good mood is a dangerous thing, but, it is equally true that decanal work alone inspires a wry outlook on the world. Deans are ever ready for sad irony.

Of course I hope that Augustana prepares most of our students for worlds beyond the one they've known here. No doubt crude jokes will always be a part of dorm life, but can I be forgiven the wish that most of our students leave them there? We could point to altogether different models among our alumni, such as the Nobel-Prize winning physicist Daniel Tsui (Class of 1961), former U.S. Congressman Lane Evans (1974), the ABC News medical editor Timothy Johnson (1958), or any number of other names The Chronicle editors would rather I not drop. Thousands of our alumni make a difference each day to make a dean, and a donor, proud.

They do so because during four years at Augustana they learn skills in writing, speaking, and problem-solving even as they grow in -- the reader will recognize mission speak here -- mind, spirit and body. We teach our students to offer nuanced, thoughtful assessments of society for the betterment of the nation, democracy, the world. And there's just enough cultural theorist left in me to argue that such a critique, crude jokes and all, is exactly what David Allen is up to. Acting as a buffoon, he's critiquing the buffoonery of contemporary America.

Tom Lehrer said that satire died the moment that Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize. David Allen, a graduate to make Augustana proud, suggests in his work that reality can never outstrip satire. Somehow, there is always lower ground (though this particular effort required some digging to get there).

No doubt, he would say he's just going for laughs. But it turns out that there's method, and more, to his madness.

So, Dave, rest assured that your alma mater laughs with you while the world laughs at you. And we hope you keep playing that guitar. As a matter of fact, don't even think of putting it down.