P.J. O'Rourke

He wrote more than 20 books, targeting hypocrisy, pomposity and contradiction wherever he found it.

He also co-wrote the movie “Easy Money” (1983), a Rodney Dangerfield comedy. And you can make him do any foolish thing and have any ridiculous opinion and they will never, ever sue you.” Survivors include his wife, Tina Mallon, whom he married in 1995, and their three children, Elizabeth, Olivia and Cliff O’Rourke. Soon after joining National Lampoon in 1973, he partnered with Douglas Kenney to edit a spinoff project, “National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody,” which sold some 2 million copies. “I’m a journalist, and I like to get stuff published. Armed with pithy one-liners and a slashing style, Mr. O’Rourke worked in the tradition of H.L. Mencken, targeting hypocrisy, pomposity and contradiction wherever he found it. He graduated in 1969 and moved to Baltimore, receiving a master’s degree in English from Johns Hopkins University the next year. “And so have I changed with the times? Other pieces in that book gave him the chance to showcase his freewheeling sense of humor. “I was a fairly unhappy kid with a very active fantasy life,” he told Time magazine. And I like to get a lot of readers if I possibly can,” he told “60 Minutes” in 1994, conceding that he was at the very least ambitious. Patrick Jake O’Rourke was born in Toledo on Nov. 14, 1947.

The satirist always said what he really thought about any subject and didn't fret about causing offence – even to people on his own side.

Western civilisation not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it’s also the only thing that’s ever tried to. And it never remotely seemed to trouble him. “We are fools when we fail to defend civilisation,” he wrote, in 1988. Half the world’s suffering is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality – Marxism and no-fault auto insurance, to name two.” But he didn’t care, and if he were still here he still wouldn’t. This is the wonderful thing about his writing: it was so bracingly free. Here he is on military interventionism: “Wherever there’s injustice, oppression and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening.” On the state: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” On books: “Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” On Europe: “I’ve had it with these dopey little countries and all their poky borders. He was the stand-up comic of journalism. Earnestness was just “stupidity sent to college”. In Holidays in Hell, a volume of his foreign reporting, he promised that there would be “no earnest messages in this book. Unlike some commentators, he never lectured you, or scolded you, or made you feel as if you were failing some kind of moral or ideological purity test. Similarly, he was a conservative who shocked conservatives. The terror of causing offence, and of being seen to “punch down”, imposes severe limits on what a comedian dares to joke about. He does all the work for you.

As a long-haired socialist writing for National Lampoon, he went to cover the 1972 Democratic Convention and was stopped by a sceptical security guard. “I think ...

Everything under the sun during the Trump era was put down to stupidity. After the glistening optimism of the Reagan years, and cool complacence of the 1990s, O’Rourke struggled to find his place. I can’t blame O’Rourke for being disgusted by the crude sloganeering of the MAGA crowd. “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it,” he once wrote. I didn’t agree with much of Mr.O’Rourke’s politics, like many Libertarians he was little concerned with how what one chose to do impacted others,, however, I did find him funny and was sad to hear, this morning, the news of his passing. P.J. O’Rourke was a hippie who ran away to become bourgeois.

Conservative American humorist, political satirist and writer who took aim at his own generation – the baby boomers.

He complained in another essay you could not tell the “liberals who once led Vietnam protests in clown pants from the car ads”, ironically putting his young self and his father into the same boat. He became a celebrity, without slowing down in the least, but as I can attest after surviving a London evening with him and my then ABC television colleague Charles Glass, O’Rourke was one of those rare people who was nicer in private, going beyond his public affability, which often surprised those expecting combative wit. But my generation exhausted the earth’s resources of the weird ... all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. The recurrent theme in his writing was his place in his generation – the baby boomers. His political writing was based on his early change of tack from 1960s lefty to what he could call the libertarian right, libertarian being the escape hatch for those trapped within the Republican party. In the political satire that dominated his later writing, he became that rarest of things, a funny conservative.

Just when you thought politics couldn't get any more dour and starved for humor, P.J. O'Rourke shuffles off this mortal coil. The sad news broke on.

It is hard not to detect, in the venom of Cockburn and other progressives for O’Rourke, the resentment that failure tends to feel for success. We could ask scientists and scholars what to do, or pray to God, or study them ourselves and try to discern solutions, but fortunately we don’t have to do any of that because there’s a bald girl in Dublin who has all the answers.” The rhetorical sleight of hand that O’Rourke detected in Marxism was, as he put it, the doctrine’s positing that something could be worth more than people are willing to pay for it. O’Rourke’s fear of this Maoist cult led him to keep a .22 pistol in the Harry offices, but when the Balto Cong showed up again, he got his hand stuck in a drawer while trying to grab it. Harry was a self-deprecating lefty rag whose idea of humor was to run identical photos of the paper’s offices, with captions indicating one was from before, and the other after, a police raid. O’Rourke’s reflections on the 1960s are an odd blend of nostalgia, whimsy, anger, and regret, informed by the critical perspective of a more mature observer with a broader experience of the world.

His career spanned Rolling Stone, the National Lampoon, and NPR's 'Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!'

He told The New Statesman in 2020: “Politics is a matter of least worst. “She was the devil I knew – she was going to be another eight years of Obama, which we had endured. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. I just thought he was unstable … dangerous. I still do.” Entrekin told The Associated Press that O’Rourke had been working on a one-volume look at the United States, as seen from his hometown: A History of Toledo, Ohio: From the Beginning of Time Til the End of the Universe.