ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

He became in due course what I would call a conservative of the old school, bearing the intellectual markings of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. He possessed in ample measure, besides, the much-admired light touch of these twain: their ability not to see in every event the impending end of the world, and, correspondingly, the need for government action.

Conservatives in the old days could smile. They could make fun of long faces and tightly, grimly fastened lips. Conservatism, we often heard in those days, was enjoyment. It didn't center on lecturing the happy and idiotically smiling as to their moral defects and indifference to Suffering and Poverty. P.J. O'Rourke was too loose-jointed a thinker to go around trying to reorder other people's lives according to some stuffy, invented design. (Think of the New York Times editorial page.)

O'Rourke no more approved of government regulation of the economy than he did of make-your-own-rules morality, such as the Sixties had tried to cram down the national throat. He understood that there were rules, expectations, duties; they kept civilization together. It was hardly a complete shock that in 2016 he held his nose and voted for Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump, whom he (like so many others) found a moral boob.

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