The parasocial Lazlo Toth
Or, epistolary trolling
When you scream into the void, the void rarely screams back. But every once in a while, it sends you a form letter.
Or in the words of Lazlo Toth: “You send out letters, you get back letters, that’s for sure!”
Toth was the pen name1 of Don Novello, the comedian best known for playing Father Guido Sarducci, the gossip columnist for L’Osservatore Romano, on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. Beginning in 1973, he invented the modern genre of writing comic letters to scripted politicians and faceless corporations.
Lazlo Toth’s correspondences were published in three volumes over 30 years, until technology pushed his very minor art form to extinction. (In its place, we now have the grimly transactional practice of complaining about customer service on social media.) His first letter was sent to the embattled Richard M. Nixon on November 1, 1973 with a simple message:
Dear Mr President,
Fight! Fight! Fight!
I’m with ya!
Sincerely,
Lazlo Toth
(His “message of support was most encouraging” to the President.)
As a Concerned American, Toth contributed to the modern idea of a parasocial relationship. As memorably defined by Sarah Hagi, it’s a term that was used “correctly once, and then through a game of social media telephone … lost all meaning within approximately 3 minutes” and has now come to describe “when you think you have a relationship with someone you don’t actually know, usually a famous person.”
“I’ve been going to your restaurants so long, I feel I can call you Howard,” Toth wrote parasocially to Howard Johnson Restaurants.
And he complained directly to Ray Kroc, president of McDonald’s, that an unappetizing 1974 billboard for the new Egg McMuffin depicted the sandwich with jelly on the side. “It just makes me sad that the egg McMuffin looked so good and that jelly just goes and spoils the whole thing,” he wrote.
“In our Egg McMuffin outdoor billboards we show jelly next to our newest product for one main reason,” replied Darrough Diamond, national advertising manager for McDonald’s System Inc. “We have found that a lot of our customers take off the top half of the muffin and eat it separately from the rest of the Egg McMuffin product.” Diamond includes a gift certificate “which should go most of the way” to purchasing an Egg McMuffin.
Toth upped the ante by suggesting that, by that logic, jelly should also be supplied with hamburgers, a move Darrough Diamond was bold enough to reject. “Most people prefer ketchup, mustard, onions and pickles — the way we make ’em.”
Lazlo Toth didn’t know Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Lee Iacocca, or Margaret Thatcher, but that didn’t stop him. And because customer service and political fundraising required that every letter be acknowledged, their assistants had to play along. As Francis Coppola (of all people) blurbed on 1992’s Citizen Lazlo: The Lazlo Letters Vol 2, “they reveal that our canned culture is on automatic — the lights are on, but nobody’s home.”
Mental vacancy is certainly the impression delivered by Air Canada’s 1977 explanation that the tomato soup Toth complained about was actually tomato juice:
“Soup is very seldom served by the airlines, because of the difficulties inherent in its provision, and it is regretted that this was not clarified with you.”
Very occasionally, the human spirit triumphed and Lazlo Toth found a person in the machine. In 1981, an executive assistant to Vice President George H.W. Bush responded “with considerable personal pleasure, for I am an avid fan of yours, having gone as far as to purchase a copy of your last book for use as a sort-of counter-training manual in the Bush for President headquarters last year when I was in charge of answering the candidate’s mail.”
And in 1991, Ronald McDonald himself replied to Lazlo, opening his letter by asking “Are you still putting jelly on the top half of your hamburger buns?” (Sometimes the person in the machine is a clown.)
By the late 1990s, all of Toth’s relationships had washed away like sandcastles in high tide. McDonald’s replied with form letters and Al Gore had no interest in post-2000 career advice. The void returned to form.
Nuts to them!
Benjamin Errett
Quick quips; lightning
“Often when I pray, I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address.”
— C.S. Lewis
“I would have answered your letter sooner, but you didn’t send one.”
— Goodman Ace
“All politicians in the end are like crazed wasps in a jam jar, each individually convinced that they are going to make it.”
— Boris Johnson
Speaking of...
Fast-food retorts
Witty correspondence
GWQ No. 124 belongs in a self-obsessed stamped envelope. Maybe you and I have a parasocial relationship? (Not you, Jacob.) I’ll consult my paralegal. I mailed copies of Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting to many people, and some replied. Grab your geologist’s hammer and give the ❤️ below a whack.
The real Laszlo Toth spelled his name with an S and became infamous in 1972 for smashing Michelangelo’s statue Pietà 15 times with a geologist’s hammer while shouting “I am Jesus Christ! I have risen from the dead!”