Playing Santa Changed Bob Rutan Profoundly
Key topics
The Esquire article about Bob Rutan's experience playing Santa has sparked a lively debate about the magazine's distinctive writing style, with some commenters hailing it as a "rhetorical masterpiece" and others finding it "weird" and overly verbose. While saaaaaam criticizes the writing as a relic of another age, others like loloquwowndueo and adzm argue that its colorful language helps paint a vivid picture. The discussion also touches on the challenge of finding one's own voice, with fallous suggesting that many writers are trying to emulate Tom Wolfe's style rather than forging their own path. As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that the Esquire writing style is both polarizing and nostalgic, evoking strong reactions from readers.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Moderate engagementFirst comment
4d
Peak period
10
84-96h
Avg / period
7.5
Based on 15 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 13, 2025 at 11:30 AM EST
24 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 17, 2025 at 6:14 AM EST
4d after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
10 comments in 84-96h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 17, 2025 at 8:20 PM EST
20 days ago
Step 04
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“ They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender.”
“ For the price of three beers, he told me his story.”
“ In the two decades since the show aired, a hundred thousand American Spirits had yellowed Bob’s fingers and turned his voice to gravel.”
When I read things like this I find it very hard to take the wider message seriously, because it feels like writing-as-cosplay, the writer inhabiting a caricature of “hard bitten” and inserting that at the forefront of the piece.
Very odd.
Sometimes people really are hard-bitten.
* It's kind of like a specially designed room standing on the sidewalk of a city street, where you can put your iPhone on speaker and still hear the other person talk. Only it comes with it's own iPhone that you can rent for less than a dollar with an old form of Venmo.
Personally, I liked the writing.
13.7 per day, I guess it could be worse.
I agree: but to me that's at least something kind of interesting and evocative, even if it's a trainwreck. (In fact, it might even be better when it's a trainwreck). A nice break from LLM's this-not-that. This one's not so bad IMO.
Playing Santa did strange things to Bob Rutan
or just the first line of the Esquire title:
Playing Santa does strange things to a man