The current issue of Washingtonian magazine has a story on why conservative writers are funnier than liberal ones (it doesn’t appear to be online). P. J. O’Rourke, Andy Ferguson, and Christopher Buckley are, fittingly, the most prominent figures in the piece. But yours truly appears in there as well as do Florence King, Matt Labash, David Brooks, and a few others. One of the others, Mark Steyn, was my pick for the funniest conservative writing today. Unfortunately, a quote from me in this regard was somehow butchered in the process. Or at least I think it was. Here’s the full paragraph in question:
Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online, says P.J. O’Rourke will “remain the king of comedy on the right for a very long time.” Goldberg thinks the funniest conservative writing today is that of Mark Steyn — “a weird cat but simply brilliant.” Of Steyn’s America Alone, he says “To make a fairly apocalyptic vision about demographic collapse and jihady conquest is hard.”
Now, perhaps I misspoke to the author, Joanne Collings (a perfectly charming lady, by the way), and I didn’t record the conversation. But that sentence just doesn’t make sense or sound right to me. I’m pretty sure the right quote — and certainly the right thought — would have been: “To make a fairly apocalyptic vision about demographic collapse and Jihadi conquest FUNNY is hard.”
As for me calling Steyn a “weird cat” I hope Mark understands I meant it in the best possible way. But a guy with an accent that is part James Bond villain, part Thurston Howell III and Part William F. Buckley, who dresses like Beau Brummel except when he’s in his New Hampshire lair — where he dresses like one of the Darryls from the Newhart show — who seems like an immortal from the Highlander series in that he’s been everywhere and met everyone over the last three centuries and yet always looks like he’s 34, and who seems to know everything about everything when he’s writing for every English language publication in Christendom is, in my book, something of a weird cat. Would that I could be remotely as weird as he.
