Ennet House founding: the Guy Who Didn't Even Use His First Name
who in his new humility so valued AA’s tradition of anonymity that he refused even to use his first name, and was known in Boston AA simply as the Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name
Context
Deadpan comedy stretched taut over total earnestness, and the two never come apart. The joke-name is generated by — and honors — a genuine act of self-surrender: the more completely the man effaces himself, the more absurdly conspicuous the effacement becomes, until anonymity curdles into a proper noun. The narrator's flat postmodern delivery ("simply as the Guy Who…") plays the whole thing for comedy and never once punctures the sincerity underneath; the humility and the laugh are the same fact, which is the book's wager about AA in one sentence — the register can be ridiculous and load-bearing at once.