3/24/2023 0 Comments Laughing at liberasLike everyone else I spoke with, Christopher Buckley, author of several satirical novels including last year’s Boomsday and my favorite Washington guidebook, Washington Schlepped Here-and son of National Review founder William F. David Brooks in the introduction to Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing It was a romantic notion, hoping that I could be the first conservative in the history of glossy magazines to be shown with his arms not folded across his chest. Mencken, he says, was “revered, especially by writers on the left in the ’20s,” but he was later revealed to have had some offensive beliefs (including anti-Semitism): “The writing was just as good, the jokes were just as good, but now there was something about them that made people uneasy.” He adds that “political writers who are funny are generally funny only on the surface.” He cites the legendary H.L. Chief among them is the late Texas writer Molly Ivins (Who Let the Dogs In? Incredible Political Animals I Have Known). Flanagan is one of the “charming, very light writers” who are “not doctrinaire conservatives.” Hays, he says, “has a lot in common with Florence King.”Īs for funny liberals, Ferguson doesn’t find many. This list would be repeated by others.įredericksburg resident Florence King-who writes for the conservative National Review and once alternated columns with Ferguson in the American Spectator-is, he says, “off the charts, and the last chart was printed in 1565.” He calls her Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady-a fond look at her unusual family that brings back a long-gone Washington-“one of the greatest American memoirs.”įerguson is also high on Caitlin Flanagan (To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife) and DC writer Charlotte Hays (Somebody Is Going to Die If Lilly Beth Doesn’t Catch That Bouquet: The Official Southern Ladies’ Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding, written with Gayden Metcalfe). O’Rourke, Jonah Goldberg, Matt Labash, and-a surprise-Dave Barry. They feel as though they’re the minority even with a Republican White House.Īndrew Ferguson, senior editor of the Weekly Standard and author of last year’s Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America, says that’s because “the culture itself is in the hands of people who don’t agree with conservatives, don’t even like conservatives-Hollywood, the media, the foundations, a lot of businessmen.”įerguson offers a list of funny political writers: Mark Steyn, P.J. They’re friends they write introductions for one another’s books. O’Rourke in Republican Party ReptileĪll of the conservative writers I talked with know one another. Radicals and liberals and such want all jokes to have a ‘meaning,’ to ‘make a point.’ But laughter is involuntary and points are not. So I decided to find out why-and which authors make conservative writers themselves laugh. Still, if labeling myself, I’d go with “liberal Democrat.” Then I found myself laughing out loud at conservative writers. I find national politics mostly a spectator sport. But I’m used to sticking up for where I live: That’s something you learn when you grow up in New Jersey. Ever since moving to Washington 22 years ago, I’ve had to defend the place to practically everyone I know outside the Beltway, all of whom seem to hold DC residents responsible for everything that goes on here.
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