Identification with Ireland is a hobby for Americans - they are not interested in seeing it as a modern country, according to satiric writer Joe Queenan. He talks to Anna Carey.

Joe Queenan is the master of the fast, efficient hatchet job. Over the past two decades, he has produced some of the meanest, funniest journalism ever written. Having begun his journalistic career at the satirical magazine Spy, he went on to make his name as a film critic and an entertainingly caustic writer of celebrity interviews and profiles before branching out into creative non-fiction; his books include America, his exploration of American pop culture's dark side, and The Unkindest Cut, the hilarious true story of his attempt to make the cheapest feature film ever.

Now, in Queenan Country, the self-confessed Anglophile makes his first solo visit to England without his English wife in an attempt to capture the English psyche. "In the United States WASPs are boring," he says. " But in England they're really funny."

Queenan writes entertainingly about English idiosyncrasies, but perhaps his funniest and best writing about national identity has been when he examines the ways in which some of his fellow Irish-Americans romanticise Ireland. "I think that there's a great sense that the Irish in America prevailed," he says. "We started with nothing but we took over city hall, we took over the police forces, and we took over journalism. So there's a sense that we won, and now we want to have a back story. But we don't want that story to be the boring truth. We don't want it to be 'my grandparents came over here with no money and then they died.' We want a romantic story about a mystical village in a magical country."

Identification with Ireland, Queenan suggests, is like a hobby for some people. "They listen to Chieftains records, they like that stuff. But they don't want to know about politics, they don't want to know about the economy, they don't want the real stuff. They also don't want to see Ireland as a modern country. I think Americans see Ireland - and Britain - as places where things happened in the past, not places where things happen now. And they're not interested in Britain or Ireland today, that's not why they go there. They go to Ireland to see castles."

Queenan himself, however, seems to have a more realistic view of things. His current favourite example of Irish culture isn't anything trad - it's Father Ted, to which he was introduced by his English brother-in-law. "I love that show," he says. "My son loves it, too. I think my favourite episode was the one with the Eurovision Song Contest."

He also loved Jim Sheridan's In America. "It didn't just tell the usual story about Ireland that we get over there - the IRA, canny rustics," he says. "It was a new story. And it really worked."

Although he has made a career out of being, in his own words, "a complete and utter bastard", and once described himself in print as a "sneering churl", Queenan isn't quite as cynical as he appears. His vitriolic writing - and it really is vitriolic - stems from a genuine love of pop culture.

"MAD magazine had a great influence on me when I was a kid," he says. "They'd do a parody of a movie every month, and it was understood that you could make fun of something and still like it. That's a concept that has now gone out of favour in the US - people always think that if you're making fun of something it's because you hate it. But I think that if you know that much about a subject, maybe there's some sense of affection there. I always have a good time writing about Keanu Reeves. I like making jokes about him, imagining what his unedited unghosted autobiography would be like, and that sort of thing. But I actually really like him."

In fact, Queenan's lasting affection for pop culture is even more remarkable when you remember that he spent a year enduring the very worst of it for his book, America, which would be enough to turn most people into cultural hermits. He admits, however, that the book did change him.

"When I was writing that earlier book, there was a kind of exhilarating quality to it," he says. "Every time I went to some terrible show I'd find myself thinking 'oh, I wonder will this be worse than the last thing I saw?' But I went to see We Will Rock You, the Queen musical [ for his new book], and I just couldn't wait to get out of the room. Earlier, as a writer, I'd have thought that this was great material. But now I just didn't want to hear all those Queen songs. I don't have any ironic appreciation of these things anymore."

He did, however, find himself enjoying an Eagles tribute band in a small Cotswolds town during the same English visit. "I found it kind of sweet, actually," he says. "Americans would just be like, why don't you drive to London to see a real band? It's just two hours. People in the United States would think nothing of driving 150 miles to a big city for one night. They don't go to little local events. That's one of the biggest differences between the two sides of the Atlantic."

That we'd rather watch an Eagles tribute band than drive for two hours to see the real thing? "Yes," says Queenan. "That's the big difference." And he laughs.