“On one hand, this messiah gig is a bitch,” announces the protagonist of Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle. “On the other I've managed to fill the perennial void in African-American leadership” (1). Refusing to lead his followers to the Promised Land, he proposes mass suicide: “It’s been a lovely five hundred years, but it’s time to go. We’re abandoning this sinking ship America, lightening its load by tossing our histories overboard…” (225). Beatty’s novel plays a cruel joke on charismatic ideology by reducing it to the tragically absurd. This paper analyzes the ways that The White Boy Shuffle deconstructs the ideology of charismatic leadership through the rhetorical strategy of reductio ad absurdam, “reduction to the absurd.” In its formal and thematic parody, the novel critically revises the story of charisma, a heroic tale of an extraordinarily gifted individual who rises to political prominence. My analysis brings a historical and sociological understanding of charisma to bear on the novel’s representations of race, gender, identity, and political leadership. If charisma in the modern world is a story resembling the myths of the heroes and warriors of antiquity—the Bible’s Moses or Homer’s Odysseus, for example—contemporary readers are all too familiar with the narrative of the heroic quest written upon the lives of their political “leaders.” The White Boy Shuffle, with its anti-heroic hero, parodies this “official story”—what Toni Morrison describes as an “already read” story—and offers a narrative of political being that interrogates the nature of charismatic heroism.