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Comment by zeruch | Hacker News Reader

PJ was part of my holy trinity of American political satirists when I was in high school/college (PJ, Hunter S Thompson, Molly Ivins)* and to this day I have yet to encounter any current satirists who CONSISTENTLY come close. Part of it I suspect is that our political terrain is such a goat rodeo, and that the kind of caustic humor these folks espoused (often thumbing their noses at any number of conventions) that today would get them promptly dragged, but their insights into the zeitgeist was at the time, intensely engrossing.

* I also revered Twain and Mencken, but PJ/HST/MI were contemporaries and in my time, which carried a more visceral stamp to them.

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> the kind of caustic humor these folks espoused (often thumbing their noses at any number of conventions) that today would get them promptly dragged

I think it's the opposite actually. I think 'satirists' now are expected to be so extreme that the only think people think is funny is "the other side is composed of dribbling morons". Humor that suggests that the people with different political views may have feelings and brains is completely unacceptable.

I mean their style of humor often touched on tropes and used verbage that would now be considered...problematic. Case in point, I once got into an argument with someone over Hunter S Thompsons use of the word "queer"...I couldn't get the person to understand that 1) HST wrote and came from a different era, and even for that era, that 2) his use of the word was itself peculiar and intentionally used towards the outsized persona he broadcast through "gonzo journalism" and you had to read it in context to remotely follow along.

They simply wouldn't buy into the idea that people from "the past" would have different views and that you can't try to understand them absent that context. Otherwise everything since before 2005 is likely "wrong" somehow (I'm being horribly simplistic, but you get the idea).

It's like when I hear a lot of views right now about the CIS region, from people who have no recollection of the Cold War, or think the Cold War "was stupid". As someone who lived through the Cold War, I might even agree it was stupid, but I also understand that when I was 10-15 I was living IN it realtime, not pondering it decades after the fact.

> I think it's the opposite actually.

Do a web search for O'Rourke's "Foreigners around the world" and report back.

> Humor that suggests that the people with different political views may have feelings and brains is completely unacceptable.

I think this may be a case of politically polarization widening as the range of allowable humor narrows. What would be an example of a joke that would have been career ending for an edgy American comedian or satirist 40 years ago, but not now?

This is probably the most famous example:

http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/obscenity-case-files/pe...

That looks to be a lot more than 40 years ago though.

"What would be an example of a joke that would have been career ending for an edgy American comedian or satirist 40 years ago, but not now? "

The SNL sketch between Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase is emblematic.

Somehow, satire has degenerated into snark. It's lazy. It's mean. It poisons the well (of public discourse).

Two quick examples are thestranger.com (under the leadership of editor Dan Savage) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Whatever point, perhaps even meritorious, they're trying make, it's buried under sarcasm and insults.

Absolutely exhausting.

Maybe this cycle started with TV. All the slapfights. Gore Vidal v William F. Buckley Jr. Shows like Crossfire.

O'Rourke led the way into snark. Remember he was contemporary with George Carlin and Richard Pryor, both consistently, actually funny. He was just mean-spirited.

I don't think he was mean-spirited at all, at least through the mid-90s, but he didn't really start to lose the plot until he became a CATO fellow/left Rolling Stone in the early 2000s.

He was terse, and spoke things out loud about the American subconscious that was often uncomfortable (much like Mencken) across the political spectrum. To plagiarize a BBC article: PJ O'Rourke memorably said that the American public viewed the Bosnian war as pitting the "unspellables" against the "unpronounceables".

You can view that as heartless detachment, or you can see it as an unvarnished observation of the total disconnect the American people had with what happened in the Balkans at the time. I suspect PJ left those kinds of statements open-ended for the exact purpose of having to make people think about them...were they capable of mustering the electricity between the ears (knowing that some likely wouldn't).

_Parliament of Whores_ was assigned reading in my high school polisci class and I was a fan from then on though our politics diverged along the way. There's a terrific doc about Molly Ivins on HBOMax currently!

Stephen Colbert in his Colbert Report days was certainly in the same league.

Enjoyed by both liberals and conservatives who managed to take away very different messages.

it's pretty wild comparing Strangers with Candy/Colbert Report Stephen Colbert to today's Late Show Stephen Colbert, I wonder what happened.

Software engineers aren't the only ones who test and iterate.

You might enjoy Joan Didion per this >but their insights into the zeitgeist was at the time, intensely engrossing

Charlie Pierce (now writing for Esquire) may fit the bill for you.

Pierce can get some good ones off, but I find his writing often lacks the laconic elegance or sheer surrealism of some of PJ or Thompson's writing. Sometimes he veers into old-man-yells-at-cloud territory, and too be fair it feels like most political commentary from a certain generation has succumbed to that amidst and post Trump.

Add a topping of Gore Vidal.

I have been delving into Vidal recently. The documentary on Buckley and Vidal from the '68 conventions is also a great watch.

His writing is well thought out and fun to read, too. Armageddon and the Narratives of Empire series are exceptional.

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