We are saddened to report the death of our friend and colleague, our H. L. Mencken Research Fellow, P. J. O’Rourke, this morning at 74. For those of us who grew up with P.J., this feels like a very personal loss.
When I was in college, the most popular magazine on campus was National Lampoon, which he edited. I remember quite a few funny bits from it, but I can’t quote them because I think they all involved drug use, gender relations, and other topics that are now off-limits.
He then moved on to Rolling Stone, where he was the Foreign Affairs Desk Chief, which was totally cool because they paid him to travel wherever he wanted. Though why he wanted to travel to Beirut and to a televangelist’s retirement village was always kind of mystifying.
And then, as he moved out of the rock’n’roll stage and into the age of sober reflection, he became a correspondent for the soberest magazine in America, the Atlantic Monthly. He wrote soberly about Medicare reform, Social Security reform, campaign finance “reform,” and other adult topics.
More recently, as he moved into the age of worrying about retirement and college tuitions, he became the editor of a magazine on finance and investment, American Consequences. Serious topics indeed, but that didn’t stop him from having fun with them.
P. J. published more than 20 books, including Holidays in Hell, Republican Party Reptile, Driving like Crazy, All the Trouble in the World, and The CEO of the Sofa.
A few years ago I had the idea to give a young colleague for Christmas a post‐graduate course in political science and economics — P. J.’s books Parliament of Whores and Eat the Rich. So I went to my local Barnes & Noble to search for them. Not in Current Affairs. Not in Economics. No separate section called Politics. I decided to try Borders, then the best large bookstore around. But first — to avoid yet more driving around — I went online to see if my local Borders stores had them in stock. Sure enough, they did. Checking to see where in the store I would find them, I discovered that they would both be shelved under “Humor–Humorous Writing.” Oh, right, I thought, they’re not books on economics or current affairs, they’re humor.
Yes, P. J. was one of the funniest writers around. Indeed, he has more citations in The Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations than any other living writer. But what people often miss when they talk about his humor is what a good reporter and what an insightful analyst he was. Parliament of Whores is a very funny book, but it’s also a very perceptive analysis of politics in a modern mixed‐economy democracy. And if you read Eat the Rich, you’ll learn more about how countries get rich — and why they don’t — than in a whole year of econ at most colleges. In fact, I’ve decided that the best answer to the question “What’s the best book to start learning economics?” is Eat the Rich.
P. J.’s books were a big deal. At least two were #1 New York Times bestsellers. He used to do tours for each new book, with newspaper interviews, TV and radio appearances, bookstore readings, and often Cato events around the country. For one such tour we copied rock star tours and produced a T‑shirt featuring the tour dates on the back and a favorite quote on the front: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
We’re going to miss P. J. terribly. But as long as we have his books and his other writings, we will remember how much he made us laugh and how much we learned along the way. We extend our deepest condolences to his wife, Tina, and their three children.
