Hunter Thompson was the druggie Jerry Lewis, trying soo hard to be funny. His Colorado home, from which he made late night phone calls to his movie star friends, was his Sands Casino.
On a point of craft, I once compared how three writers handled an arcane maneuver at the 1972 Democratic Convention. The McGovern forces had to win a procedural point by losing a substantive vote; such was their discipline that they succeeded. NR’s James Jackson Kilpatrick explained the paradox in a paragraph. Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1972, took six pages. Hunter Thompson, in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972, took 22 pages, and didn’t explain it all that well. They weren’t funny either.