The Indispensable Humorist

The title of this volume, The Funny Stuff may imply that other volumes are available of the same type, but it is not the case. P.J. also published 20 volumes of really funny stuff. O’Rourke are, indeed, already weighing down our bookshelves.

What this new book does is build a kind of museum exhibit of O’Rourke sentences, the better to examine them up close while we note their careful construction and hell-for-leather action. As for the perky title, it’s just an opening gambit, a promise that you’ll want to pause admiringly here, there, and everywhere, maybe memorize some of the words and plagiarize them in conversation until you get too big a laugh and have to admit, yeah, I am just ripping off P.J. O’Rourke.

The Funny Stuff reminds us of O’Rourke’s amazing range for subjects and settings (cars, manners, sex, Africa, government spending, drugs and alcohol, and on and on), unusual for someone so inimitably himself on the page. The range is, I think, a happy byproduct of the author’s well-known lust for life in all forms, which helps make him one of the most companionable writers I can think of.

By the way, I just read an essay by David Bentley Hart complaining about how modern English prose is so stripped of character that it’s hard to tell which writer wrote what sentences. Not so with O’Rourke and not because of any grossly indulgent flourishes. His sentences, like his point of view, were the product of a true appetite for understanding paired with a comedian’s gift for parody. These sentences are amazing examples of craftsmanship. The ones that weren’t born perfect were surely raised to be perfect, turned upside-down and inside-out many times before their creator was satisfied that they weren’t getting any more logical, readable, or funny—then he hammered them shut and waterproofed them.

As a staff editor for several years at the Weekly Standard, I was always excited when it fell to me to copyedit an essay by O’Rourke—excited, at first, but then disappointed because he had left me nothing to do but check his spelling. While I was able to query a few passages to keep us honest, the text shined like polished gold. He made copyeditors superfluous. Really. He made it seem like bad.