P.J. O’Rourke’s sentences were masterpieces. For example:
“Wherever there’s injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening.”
Or:
“Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.”
I don’t know WHY that is so good. It’s hard to put into words. Beyond the MEANING he’s conveying … even separate from the meaning – what I truly admire is the skill in execution.
There is an epidemic of people who THINK they’re funny because they think quoting Seinfeld episodes will fool the trapped listener. Or people who think saying, “Alllllll righty then” makes them funny, when really they are just quoting Jim Carrey. Or South Park. Or fill in the blank. Quoting somebody else’s humor does not make YOU funny. Snark also isn’t automatically funny. Comedy is a real skill. For the most part, you have to just HAVE it. It can’t be taught. Although if you do want to incorporate humor – rather than snark – in your writing, then you might as well learn from the masters.
People like P.J. O’Rourke. Or one of his idols, Evelyn Waugh. Both have an unholy mix of gimlet-eyed dissatisfaction with the world and everyone in it and a rampaging sense of hilarity. It’s hard to write funny. A lot of comedians rely on physicality to get the joke across but to do it in language is a rare gift. P.J. O’Rourke KILLED at one liners. They are so airtight it’s difficult to wiggle out of them even if you disagree with whatever sentiment he’s going on about. All you can really do is sit back and admire his dazzling skill. There’s a ba-dum-ching to a lot of it, his stuff is practically vaudevillian, similarly filthy-minded, eternally cranky, unimpressed, refusal to kowtow, with that rebellious National Lampoon mindset, so difficult to describe to people who don’t get it, mainly because National Lampoon has gone so mainstream it basically IS the mainstream – although considering the tenor of the current moment, National Lampoon has the subversive underground appeal it did at the outset.
Sometimes reading O’Rourke made you feel so bad. Not bad, like sorrowful, but bad like ashamed of yourself. I remember reading an essay he wrote about Haiti – I think it was in Rolling Stone – and it made me laugh so hard. Of course the situation in Haiti is not funny. And O’Rourke didn’t find it funny. But his LANGUAGE is funny. One of his eyes always squinted at the absurdity of it all. And absurdity does not mean “un-serious” or “funny”. Absurdity meant incompetence, stupidity, cruelty, bureaucratic fuck-ups (a redundancy, there) … “Absurdity”, i.e. human folly, led to people getting hurt, being trampled over by strong-men, treated unfairly, or ignored. So the stakes are high. O’Rourke’s tone skewered any self-serious person who may think they and only they were qualified to such-and-such. He hated the bureaucratic class. His most dangerous weapon was his humor. There’s a reason satirists are often the first on the chopping block of autocratic governments come to power by strong-arm means. You can’t have people walking around thinking they can make fun of you without there being repercussions!
O’Rourke was *brutal* on his own generation. There was a wry “takes one to know one” tone to his commentary on Boomers, which made it even funnier. Contempt doesn’t even come close to his attitude. You can see the influence of Evelyn Waugh here – who was a member of his own generation – of course, as we all are – but who was also separate from it, distanced enough to make some very cutting observations. O’Rourke’s eerily perfect sentences create little airtight pockets of rhetoric and humor from which you cannot escape. You can disagree with him – of course – but you can’t do so while the sentence is being read. He leaves you no inroads. There’s no way IN. O’Rourke carried the metaphors and analogies to their most absurd and/or satiric extremes. O’Rourke had a healthy sense of disrespect for everything, especially politicians and government, and I always found this refreshing. I’ve said it before: You will never – and I mean never – find me in the audience at a campaign rally, crying and cheering for some politician. Never. I was never like that, not even when I was a naive kid who had just started voting and felt passionately about the issues. I felt passionately about the ISSUES, not the person at the podium. I consider politicians to be a necessary evil. And THEY work for US. They aren’t celebrities. Hold them to account. Don’t stick up for your side if your side sucks. You True Believers are the worst. I am suspicious of all of them and I consider that to be a very healthy attitude, although it doesn’t make me any friends.
I remember being in college, sitting in the quiet library, and reading one of O’Rourke’s essays in Rolling Stone, a ruthless sendup of Congress’ machinations. His writing was so funny I was laughing out loud, so much so that I could not continue and had to get up and walk out. An essay about LEGISLATURE made me disturb the peace. Almost no one can pull that off.
His book Parliament of Whores is a classic: I put it in the company of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail as one of the best books about the American political process. Nothing can really top Thompson’s, but O’Rourke’s come close.
My way in, with people like this, is always the writing. You can write about politics all you want, but if you can’t, you know, WRITE, then I won’t be reading you. Something about O’Rourke’s humorous contempt for all the boobs staggering around Washington resonates with me. But even aside from politics, O’Rourke was a funny personal essayist, too, and wrote books on “manners” and “being a bachelor”. He was also a VERY cranky traveler. He was so funny and occasionally mean about other nations. It reminds me a little bit of Paul Theroux’s travel books, which are … hilarious. A crankier traveler cannot be imagined. But they’re both so much fun to read. Mencken is like that too. I disagree with Mencken all the time! But he’s so much FUN to read.
Here are some O’Rourke sentences, plucked out at random. I will miss him.
— A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
— Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.
— With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn’t think possible in today’s world. They have created a land of make-believe that’s worse than regular life.
— In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that’s fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters.) And everything that isn’t fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe.
— There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.
— To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.
— The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don’t know.
— Bachelors know all about parties. In fact, a good bachelor is a living, breathing party all by himself. At least that is what my girlfriend said when she found the gin bottles under the couch. I believe her exact words were, “You’re a disgusting, drunken mess.” And that’s a good description of a party, if it’s done right.
— Nobody knows everything. Nobody even knows everything about any one thing. And most of us don’t know much. Say it’s ten-thirty on a Saturday night. Where are your teenage children? I didn’t ask where they said they were going. Where are they really? What are they doing? Who are they with? Have you met the other kids’ families? And what is tonight’s pot smoking, wine-cooler drinking, and sex in the backseats of cars going to mean in a hundred years? Now extend these questions to the entire solar system.
— Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.
— It’s hard to come back from the Balkans and not sound like a Pete Seeger song.
— People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don’t need politics, they have jobs.
— Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.
lol
RIP.
