For decades, PJ O’Rourke, who died this week, was the wittiest writer in America. Witty, that is, rather than merely funny. He wasn’t a stand-up or mere gag man. He was a satirist: a master of language in a tradition that goes back to Jonathan Swift and, in America, Mark Twain.
One of the absurdities of editing is that you sometimes get sent copy by a writer whose copy needs no editing. It was embarrassing to receive PJ’s copy when it landed at the Spectator. He was such a gent, though, that he pretended it needed fixing and joked about us being “fellow laborers in the mills of Deep Thought”.
As you may guess from his name, PJ — as he was known even to his wife — wasn’t Jewish. But some of his best friends were, and some of his inspirations too, especially SJ Perelman.
The twin masks that hang over the stage of American satire aren’t those of Swift and Twain: they are grimacing faces of Perelman and HL Mencken.
Mencken was acidulous and cruel — as you’d expect from the man who introduced Nietzsche to American readers. Perelman was sharp too, but always humane. PJ had that depth and range too. He was fond of intoxication, and he inherited Hunter S Thompson’s gig as Rolling Stone’s roving hooligan, but he was never so intoxicated as to be heartless.
PJ was an outsider. He was the son of a car salesman from Toledo, Ohio, which was then a gritty steel city. He didn’t attend an Ivy League college: he went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He was a meritocrat, not a snob like Mencken, and he knew that there had to be deep thinking of the jokes to really mean something.
Satire is small-c conservative — much of its outrage derives from a wounded sense of how things should be — and the best satirists aren’t nihilists. Perhaps this explains why PJ, who called himself a “fellow-travelling Catholic”, came down on the side of the Jews. It was certainly why PJ parted company with the Republican Party when Donald Trump won its nomination: he recognised Trump as a dangerous comedian in the Mencken style.
In 2015, the hard-right polemicist Ann Coulter complained in the coarsest manner that candidates for the Republican nomination were more concerned about Israel than America. PJ responded with a defence of decency. Of course, the phrasing was impeccable — “Manners are the small change of morality. You, Ann, are nickel and diming yourself” — but it was his moral honesty that gave weight to the glitter of his words.
Antisemitism, he wrote, is “evil”. His “contempt” for antisemites was religious: “The Jews found our God, hiding in plain sight, while the rest of us were praying to ‘a rag and a bone and a hank of hair’”. That last quote came from Kipling. PJ knew his literature. And his history.
Honesty obliged him to remind Coulter that there is an “antisemitic vein” in conservatism, and antisemitism is “almost an original sin” in classical liberalism. But his objection to Coulter was also personal.
“I owe my life as something other than a complete nebbish to Jews,” PJ wrote. “I didn’t grow up in New Canaan, Connecticut [like the affluent Coulter], and I don’t know if there was a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ at the Round Hill Country Club. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and I didn’t know anything about country clubs.”
At his school, the Jewish kids were “the only kids who considered it cool to be smart”. As to why Israel should matter, PJ paraphrased John F Kennedy with a touch of cod Yiddish: “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ikh bin a Ishral. And I mean it, even if, pope-kissing Mick that I am, my Yiddish is maybe sketchy.”
He wasn’t joking.
Dominic Green is the editor of The Spectator’s world edition
