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Pastimes : Clinton Jokes! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sunshine2 who wrote (102)	9/26/1998 10:18:00 AM
From: Who, me?	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 246

Clinton Jokes Are All the Rage By CALVIN WOODWARD Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- David Letterman said traffic was so bad ''I had to squeeze through spaces that were narrower than President Clinton's definition of sex.'' Fellow comic Bill Maher dreamed up a cream rinse that the president could use ''after a day of splitting hairs.'' The Clinton-Lewinsky melodrama is playing out against a riot of ribald humor. Late-night comics and no-name Internet meanies alike are intravenously hooked to it. Never mind getting booted. Might President Clinton get hooted from office? The Center for Media and Public Affairs, which tracks the content of late-night comedy with numbing precision, has never seen such a torrent. But Clinton seems inoculated, says Robert Lichter, president of the research institution. ''What's remarkable is that Clinton is a laughingstock and it doesn't seem to matter,'' he said. William Weld, former Massachusetts governor and Clinton's choice for Mexico ambassador last year, wondered whether snickers could reach critical mass. ''If everybody's laughing when the president of the United States walks into the room, it's time to go,'' he said on PBS. Laughing at the president may also help the nation heal -- a yuk to cure the yucks. That role for wit was cited by the dead white guys of Western philosophy, one of whom considered laughs ''the natural signs of an increase in freedom.'' A common defense, submitting to barbs and turning them to one's advantage, appears unavailable to the president. Portrayed as wooden, Vice President Al Gore exaggerates his woodenness and charms the crowd. But no one expects Clinton to ham it up over women. Others are busy doing that. ''Macy's has a Clinton Day sale,'' goes one joke from cyberspace. ''All pants half off.'' Asks another: Why does Clinton have a lady's undergarment strapped to his arm? ''That's the patch -- I'm trying to quit.'' The tortured legal theory that Monica Lewinsky made sexual contact with the president but he made no such contact with her has provided more fodder: Jay Leno told his NBC ''Tonight Show'' audience that Clinton denied kissing the Blarney Stone while visiting Ireland, ''claiming the stone kissed him.'' ''Comedians have gotten so much material they could do all-Clinton monologues all the time,'' Lichter said. ''President Clinton is the best thing to hit late-night comedians since Dan Quayle.'' Actually, better. Lichter's center has counted 1,138 Clinton jokes from late-night monologues so far in 1998. That's on track to double the previous record -- Bob Dole with 838 in 1996, the election year. Quayle topped the jokefest in 1990 with only 162, back when shows were doing less political humor overall. (Q: What's the problem with political jokes? A: They get elected.) On any program where comedians riff off headlines, there's little else. On his Web site, Leno breaks the Clinton scandal into 16 joke-stuffed categories: the Dress, Apologies, the Videotape and more. He's got 18 cigar jokes alone. ''Andy, go call my mother and tell her not to watch tonight,'' Conan O'Brien told his sidekick on late-night NBC after relating yet another too-blue joke inspired by the Clinton video testimony. On the World Wide Web, a frightening number of jokes lead to the same punchline, ''Close but no cigar.'' California Gov. Pete Wilson told Clinton jokes when the House voted to release the report by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. ''Today I saw him look more nervous than a balloon salesman in an acupuncture convention,'' he cracked. What's going on here? Philosophers said humor can be used to sting the subject or lance a boil in society, or both. Comedy is found in ''the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly,'' Aristotle opined. ''The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or a deformity.'' Essayist Arthur Koestler observed ''tension finds its outlet in laughter.'' And Sigmund Freud said wit is a ''release from inhibition.'' Freud also thought, ''Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.'' AP-NY-09-26-98 0153EDT