The Funny Stuff: The Official P. J. O'Rourke Quotationary and Riffapedia

by P. J. O'Rourke

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The greatest hits and perfect "mix tape" of the writings by the late P.J. O’Rourke. You might know O’Rourke from his panelist appearances on Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!. Or maybe you’ve been reading him since his days at the influential humor magazine, National Lampoon, or the rock/cultural bible, Rolling Stone. In any case, all you’ve ever wanted to hear him say or write again is now in one convenient location—this book in your hands.

A compendium of quotes and riffs by P.J. O’Rourke on subjects ranging from government (“Giving money and power to politicians is like giving car keys and whiskey to teenage boys”) to fishing (”a sport invented by insects and you are the bait”) to apps (“we need a no-app app—let’s call it a nap”) to be published on what would have been his 75th birthday.

“P. J. O’Rourke was the funniest writer of his generation, one of the smartest and one of the most prolific. Now that he belongs to the ages, P.J. takes his rightful place along with Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker in the Pantheon of Quote Gods.”—Christopher Buckley from his introduction

When The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations was published in 1994, P. J. O’Rourke had more entries than any living writer. And he kept writing funny stuff for another 28 years. Now, for the first time, the best material is collected in one volume. Edited by his longtime friend and member of the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame Terry McDonell, THE FUNNY STUFF is arranged in six sections, organized by subject in alphabetical order from Agriculture to Xenophobia. From his earliest days at the National Lampoon in the 1970s, through his classic reporting for Rolling Stone in the 80s and 90s to his post-Trump, pandemic, new media observations of recent years, P.J. produced incisive, amusing copy. Not only did P.J. write memorable one-liners, he also meticulously constructed riffs that built to a crescendo of hilarity and outrage—and are still being quoted years later. His prose has the electric verbal energy of Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson, but P.J. is more flat out funny. And through it all comes his clear-eyed take on politics, economics, human nature—and fun. THE FUNNY STUFF is a book for P.J. fans to devour but also a book that will bring new readers and stand as testament to one of the truly original American writers of the last 50 years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802160829
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,070,387
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

P. J. O’ROURKE (1947–2022) was an author, journalist, and political satirist who wrote twenty-two books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. After beginning his career writing for the National Lampoon, O’Rourke went on to serve as foreign affairs desk chief for Rolling Stone where he reported from far-flung places. Later he wrote for a number of publications, including The Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly Standard, and was a longtime panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me.

Read an Excerpt

GOVERNMENT

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.

—Parliament of Whores

AMERICA

America’s political ideologies (of which we currently have three—Left, Right, and Insane—with considerable overlap between the third and the other two) claim to have all the answers.

—A Cry from the Far Middle

IMMIGRATION

We don’t need a wall on our border; we need gates with turnstiles and ticket-takers. The right way to limit immigration (and make people in foreign countries pay for it) is to charge admission to the United States. Disneyland costs $100 a day. There are at least 12 million illegal immigrants in America. By my calculation, you’re leaving $438 billion a year on the table.

—How the Hell Did This Happen?

 

RENTAL CARS

There’s a lot of debate about what kind of car handles best. Some say a front-engined car; some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind. You can also park without looking, and you can use the trunk as an ice chest. A rented car is an all-terrain vehicle. Mud, snow, water, woods—you can take a rented car anywhere. True, you can’t always get it back—but that’s not your problem, is it?

—Republican Party Reptile

 

CONGRESS

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

—Parliament of Whores

 

REPORTERS

If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest knowitall, you’re a reporter.

—Holidays in Heck

SOCIAL MEDIA

With social media, we’ve done something worse than create a world where we can hear what everybody says. We’ve created a world where we can hear what everybody thinks.

—A Cry from the Far Middle

 

SOCIAL SECURITY

Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near-old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.

—Parliament of Whores

 

MIND-ALTERING

I love that phrase, “mind-altering drugs.” As if there were no changes in brain function after you drink six cups of coffee before doing your taxes or after you drink four martinis before putting the nut dish on your head, mounting the back of the sofa, and reciting “Charge of the Light Brigade” to the cocktail party.  But I digress. Which I find I’m doing a lot while writing about the drug culture. It may have something to do with the drugs. I’ll have to go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.

—A Cry from the Far Middle

 

AUSTRALIA

Australia is not very exclusive. On the visa application they still ask if you’ve been convicted of a felony—although they are willing to give you a visa even if you haven’t been.

—Holidays in Hell

 

ENGLAND

Oxford and Cambridge have courses in anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, economics, and no telling what else. Meanwhile the British Empire has shrunk to three IRA informants, a time-share deal with the Red Chinese in Hong Kong, and that bed-and-breakfast of an island, Bermuda. Sic transit gloria mundi, as if anybody knew what that meant anymore.

—Age and Guile

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Editor's Note xiii

Part I America and Americans 1

Part II Good Clean Fun 71

Part III Around the World 119

Part IV Real Life 167

Part V Media and Messages 201

Part VI My Generation (Baby Boomers) 235

Acknowledgments 265

Editorial Reviews

09/26/2022

This hit-or-miss collection of witticisms contends that political satirist O’Rourke (A Cry from the Far Middle), who died in 2022, was “the most quoted man on the planet.” Assembled by former Rolling Stone editor McDonnell (The Accidental Life), the compendium draws from O’Rourke’s copious output to lampoon such subjects as “Committee Brain,” the “Security-and-Surveillance State,” Europe, and American leftists: “Enormous differences in income, wealth, and power push people toward communism. And maybe so, but the only people it pushed toward communism in America were sixties college students who already had income, wealth, and power—or at least their fathers did.” Also ridiculed are Donald Trump’s intelligence, “efficiency experts,” and U.S. foreign policy: “Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else.” Unfortunately, the bon mots (“You’re only allowed to have real ideas if it’s absolutely guaranteed that you can’t win an election”; “Americans are remarkably puritanical—when they aren’t high as kites”) are outnumbered by out-of-date duds (“There’s a sign on the door at most New York investment banks: No Shirt, No Shoes, No IPO”; “A debutante party is basically a bar mitzvah with sex in the parking lot”). This is best suited to O’Rourke completists. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Remembrances of P. J.:

“O’Rourke… came bombing in from the right side of the political spectrum, which made him doubly interesting. He was that rare conservative who appeared to be having a better time, and doing better drugs, than everyone else. He was well-read; he was, it often seemed, the only funny Republican alive.” —Dwight Garner in the New York Times

“P.J. O’Rourke was maybe the nicest person I’ve ever known, which is an interesting thing to say about a man who made his name and his reputation as a take-no-prisoners cynical wit and observer of political foibles.” —John Podhoretz in the New York Post

“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.” —Christopher Buckley in the New York Times 

“I admit that the influence of P.J. O’Rourke’s prose has not always led me down the easy road, but at least it has allowed me to have fun along the way. There is nothing I detest more than boring editorialists who think they can solve everything with the stroke of a column. What he wrote in All the Trouble in the World applies to them: ‘Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.’” —Itxu Díaz, the American Spectator 

“While his official political affiliation would in middle age see him become a Republican with a pronounced libertarian bent, he was, by way of example, as sharp-tongued and cantankerous about his new party as he was about Democrats and his former fellow travelers from the peace-and-love Sixties from which he’d emerged, a full-blown American archetype, a cranky ex-hippie who loved cars and could write his pants off.” —Jamie Kitman, Car and Driver

“He scoured West Belfast for one-liners, noting the high unemployment (‘125 per cent if you accept the locals’ figures’), bad housing (the Divis tower was ‘built in the Sixties before city planners discovered that you can’t stack poor people who drink’) and the locals’ high levels of media sophistication (‘so thoroughly journalised that urchins in the street ask, “Will you be needing a sound bite?” and criticise your choice of shutter speeds’).” —Frank McNally,the Irish Times

“He had no pretensions, mocked himself as much as he mocked everyone else, and just about every time he started typing, he nailed this tone of exasperated normalcy, this attitude of witty, snarky, irreverent incredulity with a sharp undertone of ‘Get out of my face.’” —Jim Geraghty, the National Review

“He was a proud conservative Republican — one of his books was called ‘Republican Party Reptile: The Confessions, Adventures, Essays and (Other) Outrages of P.J. O’Rourke’ — but he was widely admired by readers of many stripes because of his fearless style and his willingness to mock just about anyone who deserved it, including himself.” —the New York Times

“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.” —the Washington Post

“The staff of [Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me] wrote, ‘[O’Rourke] made his debut as a special guest on our first show after 9/11, when we needed someone to come on and be funny about terrible things, which, of course, was P. J.’s specialty.’” —NPR

“O’Rourke was one of the most quoted writers in America, dissecting US politics and culture with a withering disdain and a powerful line in put-downs – often laced with a warm, self-deprecating humanity.” —the Guardian

“Respected for his wit and storytelling by people across the political spectrum, O’Rourke’s early essays suggested a liberal leaning… However, he soon changed his political stance and his work reflected libertarian conservatism.” —Rolling Stone

“Though his rightward ideological shift was well underway by the time he was at the Lampoon — followed late in life by his public endorsement of Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump, his humor and skepticism were the major constants in his life and work.” —the Los Angeles Times

“His writing style suggested a cross between the hedonism of Hunter S. Thompson and the patrician mockery of Tom Wolfe: Self-importance was a reliable target. But his greatest disdain was often for the government — not just a specific administration, but government itself.” —Associated Press

“O’Rourke was a Toledo, Ohio, native who evolved from long-haired student activist to wavy-haired scourge of his old liberal ideals, with some of his more widely read take downs appearing in a founding counterculture publication, Rolling Stone.” —USA Today

From the Publisher

11/01/2022

The late American journalist and libertarian political humorist O'Rourke (1947–2022) had a prolific career, having reported for and run the foreign affairs desk at Rolling Stone and authored some 20 books (including 1992's Give War a Chance). This volume collects hundreds of quotes from his many published works. O'Rourke was best known for his libertarian political satire, but this collection is not limited to quips about government ("A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them") and war ("Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening"); O'Rourke also weighs in on culture, technology, and fishing. The quotes, which range in length from one sentence to a paragraph or two, are sorted into six sections ("America and Americans"; "Good Clean Fun"; "My Generation [Baby Boomers]"), each of which is further divided into an alphabetical list of subtopics. VERDICT Meant to be thumbed through rather than pored over, this title is recommended for all O'Rourke fans and anyone looking for something fun and clever. Even readers who don't ascribe to O'Rourke's libertarian politics will find passages to tickle their funny bone.—Kathaleen McCormick

Library Journal