P. J. ORourke - The Funny Stuff

Also by P. J. ORourke

Modern Manners

The Bachelor Home Companion

Republican Party Reptile

Holidays in Hell

Parliament of Whores

Give War a Chance

All the Trouble in the World

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut

The Enemies List

Eat the Rich

The CEO of the Sofa

Peace Kills

On The Wealth of Nations

Driving Like Crazy

Dont VoteIt Just Encourages the Bastards

Holidays in Heck

The Baby Boom

Thrown Under the Omnibus

How the Hell Did This Happen?

None of My Business

A Cry from the Far Middle

TUFF

FFICIALOURKE
UOTATIONARY ANDIFFAPEDIA

P. J. OROURKE

EDITED BY TERRY MCDONELL

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright 2022 by P. J. ORourke

Introduction copyright 2022 by Christopher Buckley

Jacket design by Gretchen Mergenthaler

Jacket photograph Philip Porcella

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or .

FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: November 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-6064-5

eISBN 978-0-8021-6065-2

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

For

Christina Mallon ORourke

Elizabeth Helena ORourke

Olivia Christine ORourke

Edward Clifford Kelly ORourke

CHRISTOPHERBUCKLEY

P. J. ORourke was the funniest American writer of his generation, as well as one of the smartest and most prolific. In the lonely months since he died, Ive been asking myself: What made him so darn quotable? When some years ago Penguin published The Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations, he had more entries in it than any other living writer.

Now he has an entire book of quotations all to himself, edited by longtime friend Terry McDonell. Normally, Id say what a painstaking job Terry did in creating this monumental work, but all he had to do was pluck one low-hanging fruit after another. In fact, he probably rented a combine harvester from the literary division of John Deere. The hardest part must have been deciding what not to include. Now that he belongs to the ages, P. J. ORourke takes his rightful place along with Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, and Dorothy Parker in the Pantheon of Quote Gods.

I never read or listened to P.J. without thinking, Wish Id said that. In an article for the New York Times after his death, I called him hyperaphoristic. This annoyed many readers because they had to look it up. Whatever you call someone who dispenses aphorisms, bon mots, maxims, axioms, epigrams, and apothegms, P.J. was a conveyor belt of verbal pearls. I can hear him saying, Conveyor belt of verbal pearls? Mixed metaphor alert! Okay. Conveyor belt of apothegms. Happy now?

Some people are born witty, others achieve wit, and others have wit thrust upon them. Did Patrick Jake ORourke spring from his mothers womb and say to the physician who delivered him, Doctor Livingstone, I presume? Or Get me out of this wet placenta and into a dry martini?

His Buick-salesman father died when P.J. was nine. ORourke pre used to take his son with him to bars. I see ORourke filsFrench for squirtsitting there, listening to the grown-up repartee and jokes. We dont get many eight-year-olds in here. No, and at these prices, you arent likely to.

He was a proud son of Toledo, Ohio. This pedigree made him 100 percent red, white, and blue Americano. Ohio is famous for providing us with presidents, but it has also given us P.J., James Thurber, Donald Ogden Stewart, Erma Bombeck, Dave Chappelle, and Ambrose Bierce (also, Madalyn Murray OHair, who was funny in her own way). Could it be something in the water? Ohio water was famous at one point for actually being flammable. P.J. was determined to write the definitive history of Toledo from the beginning of time to the end of the universe. He never did. The loss to history is immeasurable, but his Toledoness remained a quintessential part of him.

He went to Miami University, Ohio, which, as he pointed out, was not the University of Miami, where you could major in water skiing. He left the American heartland for the American littoralspecifically, Baltimore, where he got a masters degree in English lit at Johns Hopkins.

It struck me just now as I typed Baltimore that the city was the lifelong home of H. L. Mencken. P.J. probably had to read Joyces Ulysses to get that masters degree. One of the key words in that cinder block of literature is metempsychosis. You remember metempsychosis. Oh, right, you had to look up hyperaphoristic. It means the transmigration of a soul from one person into another. What Im driving at in my pedantic and precious way is that P. J. ORourke was the H. L. Mencken of his day.

His first job in journalism was at a lefty underground rag called Harry. It folded after a mob occupied its offices to protest Harrys insufficient Leninism. He migrated up the Acela corridor avant la lettre (look it up) to New York and a job at National Lampoon magazine. Toledo Kid meets Harvard Smart-Asses. Result: serious funniness.

In memory yet green is the moment the National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody hit the newsstands. If youre an aging boomer like me who now pays attention to the continence-aids ads on the evening news, you remember that moment too. The yearbook was a game changer. A weather changer. An underwear changer, because you laughed so hard you had to change, even though you werent incontinent then.

Masquerading as the yearbook of C. Estes Kefauver Memorial High School in Dacron, Ohio, this encyclopedic work of comic genius was largely a collaboration between Doug Kenney, a