I couldn't come up with an appropriate Sid Ceasar pun for the title of this post

Via Sullivan, it turns out that at least some ancient Romans were fairly competent jokesters, as evidenced by a recently discovered 1,600 year old joke book:

Another "identity" joke sees a man meet an acquaintance and say "it's funny, I was told you were dead". He says "well, you can see I'm still alive." But the first man disputes this on the grounds that "the man who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you".

That Philogelos. What a cutup.

The AP will be here all night, ladies and gentlemen

My sister pointed me to this AP article in the NYT, which is just a bunch of Yugo jokes. As she says: "WTF? Why was that in the NYT????"

EDIT: Possible explanation, again from my sister: "Have since found a separate article explaining that Yugos are not going to be made anymore. Maybe it was supposed to be a little sidebar to run with that article in print, and it wasn't supposed to get picked up on it's own. That's what my editor brain thinks." I think that's right.

The power of a good joke

It didn't even occur to me, but probably the single best way for Hillary to control the damage from her recent confabulations is for her to constantly joke that she is being fired at by snipers. On Leno, she did just that:

“I was worried I wasn’t going to make it,” she said as she walked onto the set (to the theme from “Rocky”). “I was pinned down by sniper fire at the Burbank airport.”

Now I think that's actually alright--it's pretty funny. And it really makes everyone who is harping on the whole thing look kind of frivolously over-serious.

I think the sort of prototypical instance of a saving joke in politics is when, in 1984, Reagan dispelled worries about his age with the following riposte against Walter Mondale in a debate:

"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

It makes you wonder if there is, in theory, a joke good enough to dissipate any scandal, no matter how bad. Like, if Nixon could have gotten out of Watergate if he had just had a good enough quip. "Good evening America. I'd have brought Checkers out for this, but he resigned earlier today." Hmm.