One of America’s greatest political satirists, who revelled in baiting both liberals and conservatives, was kindhearted in private and steeped in a Catholic sensibility drawn from his Irish roots

The death of a great comedy writer creates the paradox of laughing aloud at an obituary, due to the examples of the craft quoted there. We suspect this must have been the case with Mark Twain, the father of American laughter, and it was certainly true of the tributes to the political satirist P.J. O’Rourke, one of Twain’s greatest descendants, following his death last week, aged 74.

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys” is one of the gags that will land long after the joker has gone. Another of my favourite observations of his was: “Republicans believe that government doesn’t work, and then get elected to prove it.” And his explanation for voting Democrat in 2016: both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were wrong about everything, he wrote, but Mrs Clinton was “wrong within normal parameters”.

As these quotes show, O’Rourke (inset), unusually for a political satirist, was often harsh on his own side; with the exception of the two elections in which Trump stood, he was a committed Republican. His essential world-view was caught in the aphorism: “God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.” Although many left-wing Christians, from the Pope downwards, would dispute the first half of the sentence, it reflected O’Rourke’s belief that conservatism rewarded merit and reflected common sense, while the Left make nice promises that prove undeliverable and uneconomic. The Pope, though, would have disagreed with little in O’Rourke’s vision of his other governing ideology: Roman Catholicism.