It's all about timing, of course: by inserting his own character with a forensic skill into the very real and frightening world that surrounds us all, Ronson achieves a gag-rate that puts him on a par with that master nebech Woody Allen. I began The Psychopath Test late at night, tired, dispirited and ill – then found myself laughing like the proverbial loon for page after page, for approximately the first 40, at least. Let me state for the record: at his best, Ronson is one of the finest comic writers working today. I say 'characters' advisedly, because Ronson's books are ostensibly documentary in form, with the nebech protagonist – seemingly by chance – setting out on a quest that leads him, with many a twist and turn, through the dark hinterland of the human psyche the truth is that such is the artfulness of Ronson's arrangement of material and dialogue, that the finished result feels as if it is verging on the fictive. To which the only possible answer is: why yes, of course, because all the characters in a Ronson book are nebeches until they're exposed for the shlemiels they truly are. Could he have been mirroring me, reflecting myself back at me?' He'd seemed diminutive, self-deprecating, nebbishy, which are all the things I am. It's a comic method of which Ronson himself is by no means unaware in his latest peregrination, The Psychopath Test, he writes of Toto Constant, a sinister Haitian leader of death-squads, to whom Ronson has applied the 'test' of the title: 'There had been something reassuringly familiar about him at the beginning. In a series of bravura feature articles, documentary films and three books (one of which, The Men Who Stare at Goats, has been made, counter-intuitively, into a major motion picture starring George Clooney), Ronson has comprehensively mapped the slapstick gavotte that the nebech and the shlemiel dance together – treading on each other's feet, tearing their clothes and cannoning into other couples on the dancefloor of life.

I n Leo Rosten's unparalleled encyclopedia of the Jewish world-view, The Joy of Yiddish, he writes: 'To define a nebech simply as an unlucky man is to miss the many nuances, from pity to contempt, the word affords.' And then, as is always the way with Rosten – and Yiddish – he sharpens ones understanding illustratively: 'A nebech is sometimes defined as the kind of person who always picks up what a shlemiel knocks over.' To the non-Jewish reader this, of course, raises the question of what a shlemiel is – but you don't need to go out and buy a copy of Rosten in order to reach an understanding of this, you simply need to read the works of Jon Ronson.

The psychopath test by jon ronson