Never wear anything that panics the cat. — P. J. O’Rourke
There are but three people who’ve had an unduly indelible influence upon my professional and personal lives.
The first is comedian George Carlin. He taught me the importance of getting to the heart of the matter, that the truth is of paramount importance, and the most effective means of skewering someone or something is through the liberal application of biting humor. For example, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.”
I miss Mr. Carlin.
The second is comedian and political pundit Bill Maher who taught me there are no sacred cows. Once you start taking sides you lose your edge, your self-respect, and your humanity. Had I not VHS recorded every one of those five weekly “Politically Incorrect” episodes and binged watched them on Saturday morning, I would never have become a columnist.
Bill also showed me that you could be funny while making a dead serious point. For example, “Republicans govern with no shame with Democrats shame without governing.” Another of my similarly favorite Maher quotes is, “Someone has to tell the housewives who are reading the ‘mommy-porn’ trilogy (Fifty Shades of Gray) that there’s a man with a hard-on in the bed right next to you.”
You probably be surprised to learn that satirist P. J. O’Rourke rounds out that top three. He taught me that conservatives could actually possess a heart and soul, that self-deprecating humor was the most effective, and to never take yourself too seriously.
I have to admit that I still frequently fail at the latter point, but I’m tryin’ P. J. I really am.
Exactly where does one start with P. J. O’Rourke quotes? Perhaps with those issued solely for their comedic value:
- Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
- Never fight an inanimate object.
- Everybody knows how to raise children except the people who have them.
- The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes reviews.
- Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals when their cheery effect is needed.
- The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
- The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television, and Bullshit.
But he was always at his best when he was lampooning politics and politicians:
- You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
- Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
- It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.
- The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.
- Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don’t understand, such as working for a living.
- When are the world’s political parties going to get appropriate symbols: snake, louse, jackal, … trash can, clown face, dollar bill with bat wings on it?
- If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ‘til it’s free.
- Government conspiracy? They can’t even deliver our mail and it’s got our address on it and everything!
The first time I saw P. J. on “Politically Incorrect” I laughed so hard that my wife thought I’d finally lost it. Since then, one of my journalistic ambitions has been to be as funny was, but that’ll never happen. While we’re all prone to flinging this platitude about, P. J. O’Rourke truly was one of a kind.
He had the quickest wit I’ve ever seen. He was consistently on point no matter what the topic. He was utterly fearless in his satirical skewering, and he was hilariously funny. But best of all, he was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who could laugh at himself and his frequently humorless right-wing compatriots.
He never sacrificed his core beliefs to increase his readership, either. When it came down to a choice between Hillary Clint and Donald Trump, O’Rourke said this on NPR:
I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.
On February 15, 2022, the great P. J. O’Rourke, American satirist, humorist, H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, author of 16 books, and regular contributor the Atlantic Monthly and the Weekly Standard died of lung cancer at his home in Sharon, New Hampshire at the age of 74.
And suddenly my journalistic world feels a lot lonelier.
Who’s going to take his place? I’d ask you to name one truly funny, self-deprecating, satirical conservative columnist, pundit, or talk show host, but I know you couldn’t do it because there aren’t any.
Some years ago, Bill Maher warned us that when we start to lose our sense of humor, we become the equivalent of the Taliban. Though the divide was bad enough to begin with, simply observe the conservative and progressive responses to the pandemic and you’ll quickly understand the consequences of being unable to laugh at yourself. The folks who’ve lived through the most recent ethnic cleansing episodes are saying this humorless hyper-partisanship is exactly how it starts.
O’Rourke’s final book, “A Cry from the Far Middle; Dispatches from a Divided Land,” wasn’t as much humorous as it was wistful and perhaps a bit angry. It was as if the author, once convinced he’d live to see better political times, had finally become weary of watching them get consistently worse.
Perhaps my saving grace is I harbor no such illusion.
In his great New York Times send-off, author Christopher Buckley described his last visit with O’Rourke who told him, “You, know, I’ve doing this for a fucking half century. I’m tired.” I get it P.J. I’ve been doing it for a scant 15 years and I need to take a nap right now.
Buckley ended his piece with this paragraph:
The weariness didn’t show. Now that he’s gone, the proverbial baton is passed to a new generation of conservative satirists, specifically Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And that isn’t funny.
No, it’s not!
But let’s not forget that P. J. O’Rourke was funny:
During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So, the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?
