ArcaMax

It was poignantly appropriate that the news of P.J. O’Rourke’s death was broken by a tweet from his friend Peter Sagal, host of the Chicago-based NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” where O’Rourke had been a frequent panelist.

“(O’Rourke) made his debut as a special guest on our first show after 9/11,” the show’s staff wrote, “when we needed someone to come on and be funny about terrible things, which, of course, was P.J.’s specialty.”

Yes, it was, even for those of us listeners for whom the “terrible things” included his own deeply conservative views. His “whole purpose in life,” he once joked, was “to offend everyone who listens to NPR, no matter what position they take on anything.”

I’d say that he fell way short of offending everyone. We were too amused. As a longtime listener to his radio barbs and a reader of his essays and articles that he turned into 16 books since the late 1980s, I marveled at his ability to view the world with a bold, conservative audacity that usually didn’t scare liberals half to death.

“He was that rare conservative who appeared to be having a better time, and doing better drugs, than everyone else,” wrote The New York Times’ Dwight Garner. “He was well-read; he was, it often seemed, the only funny Republican alive.”

His more quotable quotes show the spirit of a modern-day Will Rogers or H.L. Mencken:

On his libertarian leanings: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

On human rights: “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”

On the partisan political divide:

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

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