gonzo

Gonzo likely comes from Italian-American slang gonzo, meaning a fool, a simpleton, or someone who acts crazy — derived from Italian gonzo (simpleton, dolt), which itself may come from the Spanish ganso (goose, a foolish person) or from a Venetian dialect form. The word floated through Italian-American communities for decades before it found its destiny in a hotel room in Louisville, Kentucky.

In 1970, Hunter S. Thompson was assigned to cover the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's Monthly. Deadline approaching, Thompson submitted a chaotic, hallucinatory, first-person account that abandoned journalistic objectivity entirely. His editor, Bill Cardoso, wrote to him: 'This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.' Cardoso later said he'd been using 'gonzo' in Boston Irish-Italian slang to mean the last man standing after an all-night drinking session.

Thompson made gonzo into a literary method. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and his Rolling Stone political coverage, he dissolved the boundary between reporter and subject, between fact and hallucination, between journalism and literature. The journalist was no longer a window onto events but a participant — unreliable, intoxicated, but perversely honest in admitting the biases that 'objective' reporters concealed.

The word 'gonzo' migrated from journalism to general culture. Gonzo pornography (no plot, no pretense, raw footage). Gonzo marketing (confrontational, participatory). The Muppets named a character Gonzo — the inexplicable, indefinable creature who does stunts nobody asked for. In each case, gonzo means the same thing: the rules have been abandoned, and what remains is more truthful for the mess.