‘Everybody wants to save the earth: nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.” That is one of my favourite lines from P J O’Rourke, who died this week. I can’t think how many times I have quoted it, to student audiences in particular. Like so many of his lines it does multiple things at once: it raises a laugh, penetrates fraudulence and makes us see ourselves and the world a little clearer. Sometimes O’Rourke could do this in a line, other times at book length. Best of all were his articles. It is a quarter of a century since I read his review of Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes A Village. I can still recite passages from that piece (“It takes a village idiot”). Hell, I think I could sing them.

O’Rourke was often described as a “conservative humourist”, not least in the obituaries. But I see no reason why he needed the prefix. He was simply one of the funniest writers of the age – not requiring any political limitation or descriptor. When a humourist of the Left dies, we do not need to say “Left-wing humourist”. But perhaps this focus on O’Rourke’s conservatism is because some people still think it surprising that someone on the conservative side of the argument can be universally agreed to be funny. They are wrong. Many of the funniest writers of modern times have been conservative. Auberon Waugh, Frank Johnson and Michael Wharton, to name just three who wrote for this newspaper.

But there is a reason why satire of O’Rourke’s kind is especially penetrating. It does not pretend that satire, humour or any other art form can radically change the world. In particular, O’Rourke did not labour under the misapprehension that humour could affect policy or lead a political revolution. Humour of his kind was an expression of the fact that the world is mad, in ways that are rarely new, yet always surprising, and that perhaps the best we can manage is to laugh along both at it and ourselves. It is a type of humour that can be cutting, but is rarely cruel. O’Rourke was one of the greatest plyers of his craft, alongside H L Mencken, James Thurber and Tom Wolfe.

I wonder whether we shall see his like again. You can never say never. But it seems to me that the world is a little crueller and a little less capable of self-deprecation than it was in O’Rourke’s day. The capacity to laugh at oneself or the species has been replaced by certainties that other people are wrong and that one has no flaws oneself. If that is the case, then at least we can still console ourselves by pulling O’Rourke off the shelf and basking again in a wiser and wittier soul.