O'Rourke is overtaken by events

The latest of PJ O'Rourke's sarcastic meditations on world affairs comes emblazoned with the dust-jacket eulogy: "America's greatest prose comedian". Which is unfortunate. It's not a great moment to be an American comedian of foreign politics. And for drastic ways of missing an historical punch line, the title of the last chapter of this book gets it on the nose: "August 2001".

If O'Rourke had waited to include a chapter entitled "September 2001", he wouldn't have published any of this. Now this book, by this, a writer of sometimes genuine ideas as well as comedy, must be discarded as a small, embarrassing example of the fickleness of human opinion-forming. The attacks on Washington and New York clearly render irrelevant almost his entire analysis of international events. All the flip references to Bush senior and the Gulf War, or Clinton and Somalia, belong to the world as it was before 11 September.

But it's the broader tone of the prose that really evinces the winces.

The premise of The CEO of the Sofa is stolen, as O'Rourke happily explains, straight from a 19th century column in the Atlantic Monthly, called The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. From its author, Oliver Wendell Holmes, O'Rourke takes full licence for a commonsensical parody, written as if from within a stupor of domestic idleness, of all the silliness on the globe.

Thus he opens in September 2000, sniggering to his family about the spectacle of the United Nations Millennium Summit, which he has just attended. And we get an account of the 189 member states pretending to demand world justice, while actually playing lickspittle to the American dollar. And they didn't even have cream cheese in the cafe. "At the UN they put butter on their bagels. No wonder these people can't achieve peace in the Middle East."

The affectation of idle curiosity evaporates in an America that now buzzes with attention, if not paranoia. But to mock the mocker would merely be to double the sin of glibness. Under the circumstances, O'Rourke can be credited with some guts. He is one of few eminent American authors not to have pulled out of London's Word literary festival on account of the terror attacks. He certainly wasn't reading from his book, but interviewed recently by Clive James in front of a live audience, his core argument was that an America engaged in the world was less dangerous than an isolationist America.

Yet there are still a few vintage O'Rourke moments in this isolationist book, like an extended assault on Hillary Clinton. Or his bewildered dissection of the Third Way as manifested in the UK: "a sort of clarion call to whatever". He observes Britain's own philosopher of the new politics, Anthony Giddens, revealing that the left has discovered the marketplace, and adds: "As a Road-to-Damascus experience, this is like being blinded by the realisation that you're headed in the Damascus direction."

It's not the fact that O'Rourke is trying to be funny about serious material that damns this book to the bottom of his otherwise enjoyable oeuvre. Nor even that recent tragedy has ruined his old jokes. The problem, rather, can be contained in a dart aimed, quite some time ago, by that ambivalent, English Left-winger, Christopher Hitchens, at this ambivalent, American Right-winger: "Not funny enough."