Two Years Without the Audacity and Laughter of P.J. O’Rourke

Next month marks the two-year anniversary of the death of America’s funniest writer, P.J. O’Rourke. The world of journalism is a little grayer and a lot duller since then. It’s like being on a laughter diet. He knew better than everyone that any political contest needs to be approached from just the right distance: close enough to understand the issue; far enough away to be able to disengage and laugh at it. 

O’Rourke was not just a humorist. He wasn’t just an insightful columnist, either. His writing was a perfect cocktail of intellectual intensity and a smile, and that made the conservative ideas he carried like a flag reach unexpected places and audiences, explaining the issues in a way anyone could understand; he did more for the spread of economic libertarianism in the six paragraphs of an article than did thousands of books by prestigious economic experts. This is not to the detriment of the experts but to O’Rourke’s credit.

The man from Toledo approached all issues in the same way: He took his distance in order to understand people before systems. Thus, he understood the economy from the taxpayers’ pockets, foreign policy from the direct testimony of the enemy, the immorality of certain politicians from the most personal matters of each one, because he knew that often the crotch is more telling than 1,000 speeches. 

After all, everything that concerns us is about people, including politics, economics, and freedom; ideas, associations, and parties are not free. Free is each and every person and nothing else. And as a good connoisseur of the human soul, he was very clear about the Left’s main mistake: “Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.”

He was so immensely talented that he was able to defeat all environmentalism in a single sentence: “Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.” To politicians: “People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don’t need politics; they have jobs.” To the government: “A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.” To the apocalyptics: “The world is going to hell. All we can do is look good on the trip.” To socialism: “To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.” To feminism: “We got over feminism, too. At least women did, as soon as they were hired for those high-prestige jobs that only men used to have. It turns out that work sucks.” To Republicans: “Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” To the health Nazis: “If I give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods, I can add ten years to my life. Trouble is, I’ll add it to the wrong end.” To Western demagogues: “African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.” To Obama’s lies: “The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you’re rich.” And to teetotalers: “Never Refuse Wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn’t drink must be an alcoholic.”

The list would be endless. He always hid a couple of laughs among the truth, and he always hid a bit of truth among the laughter. 

I already said in his obituary here in The American Spectator that, when he died, I was working on the first O’Rourke anthology in Spanish — today it is almost finished; I trust it will be released this year — and I dreamed of meeting him on the occasion of its presentation. Death came as a bad joke at the beginning of the show. But two years later, I have understood that everything is in his work, that he is in his work much more than other authors. (READ THE PIECE: P.J. O’Rourke: A Free Soul and the Funniest Writer in America)

We miss him. Fortunately, I will soon be able to pay him a small tribute in the United States, and soon I will also be able to tell you about it here. In the meantime, when the press gets boring, when current events urge you to melancholy, and when the political news seems to have no solution, I go back to his articles and books and discover that even the darkest problems deserve a laugh that puts them in perspective before continuing to write about them. Otherwise we run the risk of taking ourselves too seriously. And the truth is that our primary vocation is not to save the world or fix all its problems but to save our own souls. We leave it to the leftists to try to fix everything else.

Translated by Joel Dalmau.

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