P J O’RourkeAmerican Political Satirist and JournalistTuesday, September 26, 2017, Dinner, 6pmHilton Memphis939 Ridge Lake Blvd., Memphis, TN 38119Guest Fee: $75RSVP Deadline: Thursday, Sept. 21, 2017
The Economic Club of Memphis is pleased to present a dinner meeting featuring PJ O’Rourke, on Tuesday, September 26, 2017, at Hilton Memphis. A reception begins at 6pm with dinner seating about 6:45.
With more than a million words of trenchant journalism under his byline and more citations in The Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations than any living writer, O’Rourke has established himself as America’s premier political satirist. Both TIME and The Wall Street Journal have labeled him “the funniest writer in America.” He is the best-selling author of 17 books, including Parliament of Whores, Republican Party Reptile, Holidays in Hell, Holidays in Heck, Eat the Rich, and Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards. O’Rourke’s book, Thrown Under the Omnibus, was released in November 2015, and his next, How the Hell Did This Happen? The Election of 2016 was published in March 2017.
O’Rourke now writes a weekly column at The Daily Beast titled Up To a Point…, offering his classic wit and insight on today’s events, from politics to pop culture. He is also a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard and writes a regular column for Stansberry Research, an investment newsletter company.
Combining the skill and discipline of an investigative reporter with a comedian’s sense of the absurd and the stupid, political humorist P.J. O’Rourke covers current events like no one else. Known as a hard-bitten, cigar-smoking conservative, he in fact bashes all political persuasions. Whether dealing with the inner workings of Washington bureaucracy or the shifting political and economic sands of the new world disorder, O’Rourke proves himself a savvy guide to national and global affairs. His razor sharp insights never fail to inform and entertain audiences.
“O’Rourke is probably the most resilient comedy writer to come out of the early National Lampoon. He saw through the anarchists’ narcissism, and has been satirizing it for years in Rolling Stone and elsewhere. If anyone ‘changed comedy forever,’ it was O’Rourke.” —The New York Times
Born in Toledo, Ohio, O’Rourke received a BA from Miami University and an MA in English from Johns Hopkins, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. After graduate school he worked at small newspapers in Baltimore and New York.
In the early 1970s, he joined The National Lampoon where he eventually became editor-in-chief and created (with Doug Kenney) the classic 1964 High School Yearbook Parody. Concluding in the 1980s that the real world was funnier than anything National Lampoon’s writers could make up, he became a foreign correspondent and has since covered crises and conflicts in more than 40 countries.
O’Rourke has written for such diverse publications as The Wall Street Journal, World Affairs, Car and Driver, Town & Country, Forbes, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, where he was the foreign-affairs desk chief for 15 years. He is the H.L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC and a frequent panelist on National Public Radio’s game show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!