Opinion | Christopher Buckley on the Death of P.J. O’Rourke

“How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” my friend P.J. O’Rourke asked me one less-than-sober evening years ago. The answer was “One — and that’s not funny!”

He was a fellow of infinite jest. I can scarcely recall, over the 40 years we were friends, P.J. saying anything that wasn’t funny.

Of all human failings, he found humorlessness the funniest. Back then, the political left was so earnest about saving the world that there was no room for laughter, which denoted a lack of earnestness. Self-deprecating humor, P.J.’s trademark, wasn’t allowed because it could undermine the mission. Saving the world was no laughing matter. One titter and the whole edifice could come crashing down.

Humorlessness has crept in its petty pace to the right, where it is conducted with North Korean-level solemnity by the bellowing myrmidons of MAGAdom. A sense of humor, much less self-awareness, are not traits found in cults of personality. If Tucker Carlson has said anything advertently funny, witty or self-knowing from his bully pulpit, I missed it. Maybe you had to be there.

P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a particular and an essential sensibility. He found humor everywhere and in everything, especially in his fellow Republicans. We’ve lost more than the man The Wall Street Journal called “the funniest writer in America.” We’ve lost the last funny conservative.

The boomer gen’s H.L. Mencken, P.J. was summa contra everything, but joyously. If you weren’t laughing, you weren’t listening. Along with his peers Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker, he was hyperaphoristic.

“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.”

“If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.”

“Rich people don’t like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly, and the uniforms itch. Rich people don’t go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.”

“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free.”

P.J. was a Serious Man — in the sense of what his forebear Mencken might call an ernst mann — who declined to take himself seriously. That’s not to say he lacked ego. (An egoless writer is the very definition of oxymoron.) But he reveled in his various poses — the entitled, whiny boomer; the stoner high school student; the uncultured bumpkin from Toledo, Ohio; the annoyed boozer who joins DAMM, Drunks Against Mad Mothers — as much as he did in the preposterousness of his targets. He was hugely erudite and deeply read. Like another of his paradigms, Tom Wolfe, he had no illusions that he was anything more than just another player in la comédie humaine. A firm belief in human fallibility is an essential element of the conservative temperament.

P.J. wasn’t the only conservative pundit to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but he didn’t try to spray Febreze on his ballot. He voted with clothespin firmly affixed to his nose. Mrs. Clinton, he said, was wrong “about absolutely everything,” except in one regard: She wasn’t Donald Trump. “Politics,” as he’d written, “is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, or a necessary conundrum.”

The Trump era could have been one great big enormous sandbox for P.J. to play in. Instead, he found it dispiriting, a pageant of stupidity, boorishness and coarseness.

His last book, “A Cry From the Far Middle: Dispatches From a Divided Land,” published in 2021, shows him in top form, but in it there’s a note of wistfulness. The last time I visited with him, he told me, “You know, I’ve been doing this for a [expletive] half century. I’m tired.”

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.

Christopher Buckley is the author of “Thank You for Smoking,” “Make Russia Great Again” and the forthcoming “Has Anyone Seen My Toes?”

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