The CEO of the Sofa
P.J. O'Rourke
Atlantic Books £16.99, pp304
There is an American form of humour that no longer has an equivalent on this side of the water. The tradition of the comic essay died in Britain about the same time as Punch magazine. The cause of death, of course, was incurable tedium.
In the States, though, the names of James Thurber, S.J. Perelman and Wolcott Gibbs are still spoken of with something close to awe, and the role of the humorist is no joke. The writer who has done most to maintain its cultural importance is P.J. O'Rourke, author of such catchy titles as Holidays in Hell and Give War a Chance.
As Christopher Hitchens observed, O'Rourke's stock character is 'that of a crazed Sixties refugee who has renounced everything but the craziness'. Like many draft-aged men of his generation, O'Rourke waited until the end of the Vietnam War to cut his hair and make his peace with the good old-fashioned American values of militarism and materialism.
What set him apart from traditional conservatives (at least overtly) was a continuing interest in a libertarian lifestyle - his most celebrated essay was called 'How To Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink'.
That was back in the Eighties, when O'Rourke was already approaching 40. Thereafter, he furthered his reputation by being naughty abroad, writing the kind of unsayable things about Third World countries that make liberals guffaw with guilty laughter (conservatives don't read about the Third World).
Now 54, and perhaps keen to lose his long-time companion epithet 'sophomoric', he has written a book rooted in the middle-aged setting of a family house. The CEO of the Sofa is a rather mannered bow to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the nineteenth-century American author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
Perhaps in an effort to demonstrate his erudition, O'Rourke has adopted Holmes's folksy conceit of one-sided conversations with silent family members as a means of covering unrelated topics such as the New Economy, Leonardo DiCaprio and almost anything else that crosses his mind.
The digressive monologue is a natural progression for O'Rourke. He has always been a bit of a dinner-party bore, bombarding you with his wit and opinions. He even wrote an essay on dinner-table conversation in which he described the qualities of the good talker - 'an ability to hold forth at length: to tell a fully rounded anecdote, make an elaborate jest, convey news in piquant detail, or give an unexpected coif to the feathers of reason.' Guess who he had in mind?
The point about O'Rourke is that he is funny. He memorably described the USA for Africa performers (the people who sang the dismal 'We Are the World') as having 'that self-satisfied look of toddlers on a pot'. The other point about O'Rourke is that he's not that funny. One moment he'll come up with a piece of inspired absurdism that jumps off the page. Musing on the possibility of America becoming so rich that everyone is a billionaire, he writes: 'Nobody will care about money any more - just sex. I'll have to sleep with the guys at the car wash to get the interior vacuumed.'
Too often he is unable to resist a joke, no matter how lame. Take, for example, this sentence: 'People over 50 always think things are going to heck in a handbasket, or in one of those Prada backpacks, or in something.' There's a lot of this filler stuff in The CEO of the Sofa: not funny, not true, not needed. A ratio of one good joke for every three is very high. He may, sentence for sentence, be the funniest man in the English language. But he's also one of the most tiring.
Nearly as much as O'Rourke wants us to laugh at his every word, he wants us to take him seriously. If he is a humorist by talent, he's a polemicist by nature. You can make what you want of his politics, but, boy, does he need some new targets. His skewering here of Hillary Clinton's book It Takes a Village is savage, richly entertaining (including a joke about breastfeeding Chelsea that is the book's funniest) and at least three years out of date.
Like the Japanese soldier still fighting on a South Pacific island, O'Rourke doesn't seem to have noticed that no one believes in the Third Way or that the Clintons have left the White House, still less that Dubya has moved in. And for even the most devout Republican, it must be a full-time occupation not making fun of the Bush boy.
The datedness of O'Rourke's subjects is further pronounced by the datedness of O'Rourke. When he was younger (well, 39), there appeared to be a winning unorthodoxy about taking up reactionary positions more normally associated with ageing squares. But what's so radical or unusual about a fat guy in his mid-fifties holding forth on the evils of the United Nations?
There's much to enjoy in The CEO of the Sofa - a fine riff on why drugs should and should not be legalised; an amusing comparison between Venice and the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas; and welcome attacks on people such as Moby - 'like something the guinea pig just gave birth to' - and Matt Damon. But, ultimately, the tone is smug and complacent. It's the sound of a well-fed, middle-aged humorist wielding a giant Havana like an award, sinking into a freshly plumped cushion.
