'I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell' ads greeted with frosty reception

To think Universal Pictures took heat over billboards last year that featured hand-scrawled digs like, "My mother always hated you, Sarah Marshall" and "You do look fat in those jeans." Those were teasers for the rom-com Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which turned out to be not nearly as mean-spirited as the ads might've implied. But that effort seems positively quaint now that Tucker Max is on the scene. The blogger-turned-wannabe-auteur is promoting the movie version of his best-selling date-rape tome, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, with such ditties as, "Deaf girls can't hear you coming" and "Strippers will not tolerate disrespect (just kidding!)." Not everybody gets the "joke," including the Chicago Transit Authority, which just took down the ads from 250 city buses. Why they ever went up in the first place is the real mystery. Who was minding that store? Max, predictably, blames male bashers for the hubbub and says he'll go to the Web and "more open-minded cities" to hype his drunken-frat-boy movie, which is opening in limited release (mostly college towns) on Friday. Expect that to be a great day for misogyny.

—Posted by T.L. Stanley