French comedians enjoy about the same latitude to mock politicians as American comedians do. That is, until yesterday.

Stéphane Guillon, a sharp-tongued comedian, went a bit too far when he was hired by a French state radio to spice up its morning schedule. He joked about President Nicolas Sarkozy’s diminutive stature, mocked the first lady’s music career and called France’s immigration minister “chinless.” The station boss, Philippe Val, gave Guillon the ax when Guillon added Val to his list of victims.

In 1881 the government passed a law guaranteeing freedom of the press, and with the development of mass media, French comics became more vicious. When President Sarkozy was snapped taking singer and former model Carla Bruni on a date to Disneyland Paris, comedian Anne Roumanoff joked on TV: “A first for Disneyland: Snow White marries the dwarf.”

Guillon hit the big time (and a very sore spot) when he joked about the director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, shortly after the latter admitted to an affair with an IMF economist. Guillon told his live audience that to prevent mishaps “special security measures” were in place. Cameras had been put under Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s table, and female France radio staff had been warned not to dress provocatively so as not to “awake the beast.”

Mr. Guillon said that after being named chief executive of Radio France, Jean-Luc Hees had placed his manhood in Mr. Sarkozy’s hands. Strauss-Kahn claims humor is not funny when it is cruel. Of course, he wrong but the French government is getting the last laugh. It has fired Guillon.

A Michigan judge today ruled that two former waitresses who filed a weight discrimination case against the Hooters restaurant chain could proceed with their cases.

Cassandra Marie Smith, one of the plaintiffs, alleges in her complaint that she began working at a Hooters in 2008. At the time, she weighed 145 pounds. In a performance evaluation this earlier year, she claims in her complaint, a restaurant manager advised her “to join a gym in order to lose weight and improve her looks so that she would fit better into the extra small-sized uniform.” She alleged she was put on a 30-day “weight probation” and resigned.

The official uniform for Hooters waitresses, she claims, comes in 3 sizes: extra extra small, extra small, or small. Attorney Richard Bernstein, counsel to Smith, called the suit a “benchmark case” that will establish the proposition that physical appearance should not be a component of an employee keeping his or her job, according to the Grand Rapids Press. [I believe that the use of "benchmark" in this case should not be understood as a double entendre.]

To understand the case in all its FULL complexities, please CLICK HERE.

Voice: If this is a medical emergency, call 911 or go to your nearest hospital emergency room.
I persist and, eventually, reach a voice with a body attached.

SG: I would like an appointment.
Voice with Body: Are you a new patient?
SG: Why do you ask? V w/B: We have reasons. SG: Yes.
V w/B: We have next Tuesday at 9.30, 11, or 4 P.M. or on Thursday at 2 P.M. Also in three weeks, on Monday, Wednesday or Friday, anytime in the late afternoon.
SG: Monday, Wednesday or Friday? Hmmm. Sounds a bit like the Lone Ranger. Can I or should I bring a portable radio?
V w/B: Excuse me, sir? I don’t understand. SG: I’ll take next Tuesday at 9.30. Is that morning or evening?
V w/B: I don’t understand. Morning, of course. Your name, please?
SG: Sidney Gendin. V w/B: You’re all set, Sidney. Please arrive 15 minutes early to fill out some forms. Bring your insurance with you.

The following Tuesday, 9.15 A.M.
Body with a voice presents herself and hands me a questionnaire.
SG looks over the long list of questions and begins:
“History of diabetes in your family?” SG scribbles: “Your father’s mustache eats the square root of 3 for breakfast.”
Several puzzlers of that nature and SG puts down several more illuminating responses to each of them.
Finally, we get to a question about the level of pain I have been having. This one I know is important and I decide I must be very precise. “4.057739.”

I hand in my forms, sit down to read the doctor’s literature on the table. I can choose between People, Sports Illustrated, Glamour, Reader’s Digest, or Hunting and Fishing.

SG walks over to the B w/Voice, nicely ensconced in her seat behind a bullet-proof window, and asks, “Do you happen to have Annals of Family Medicine or the Journal of Electro-Physiology somewhere? They’re not on the table.” B w/V: I don’t think so. LaShawna? Do we have magazines besides those on the table?

SG: Forget it. I’ll just pick my nose, if that’s all right with you?
Voiceless Body: No response.

Sometime later – minutes, hours, decades? I’m too numb to have kept track – I am ushered into a cubby-hole room.
Return of the Body w/Voice: The doctor will be right with you. Take your clothes off.

SG: Did you read the form? I’m here to have my left forearm examined.
B w/V: Please, sir, explain all that to the doctor.

10 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes later, I walk out and tell the Body, “It’s unpleasant in there. I’ll just wait in the waiting room until the doctor is ready to see me. B with V: Suit yourself but make sure you can undress quickly when the doctor arrives.

At last, the moment arrives and before you can say, PNEUMONO­ULTRA­MICRO­SCOPIC­SILICO­VOLCANO­CONIOSIS, the Great man arrives, complete with stethoscope around his neck.

Great Man speaks: What seems to be the problem?
SG: I am not sure. I think I may have PNEUMONO­ULTRA­MICRO­SCOPIC­SILICO­VOLCANO­CONIOSIS.
The GM is a bit startled. He looks down at the questionnaire he has brought in with him. “I doubt it. Take off your shoes and shirt. You may leave your socks on.

SG: Should I remove my trousers? GM: Please don’t.

He examines my feet. He announces: Ah, hah! You have Haglund’s Deformity.

SG: No wonder Haglund is feeling so much better. Imagine his shifting it to me. What about my pain level?
GM: As you quantified it, I would say your pain level is normal for Haglund.
SG: For poor Haglund, maybe. But my pains are nearly always under 3.878882. By the way, are you the doctor?
The Not-so-Great-Man, Any-Longer: I’m his physician’s assistant, here to do the work-up. I’m a cut above a nurse.
SG: Do you plan to be a doctor some day?
The N-S-G-M, A-L now getting into the swing of things and grinning: Which day do you have in mind?
SG: The first rainy Friday of next month.
The N-S-G-M, A-L: Actually, no, nor any other day. If and when I ever finish this gig, I plan to be a really hip tenor saxophonist. You like Coleman Hawkins?
SG: He’s okay. I prefer Lester Young.
The N-S-G-M, A-L: Hey, you’re okay man. Now, let’s take a look at that left forearm of yours. You say it is killing you to the jazzy tune of 4.057739?
SG: Hot diggedy, man. Let’s get it on. I think this is going to be the beginning of a great jam session.

If anything in this world is serious business, it is humor. Or, at any rate, the analysis of it is. Of all the art forms, (or it just entertainment?), nothing creates as much controversy as a joke. It is said of all the arts and entertainments that they are very subjective. What seems lovely music to one is a dreadful bore to another. What is a beautiful painting to one person leaves another totally indifferent. But jokes cause the most far-ranging set of reactions. A joke may cause one person to laugh hysterically while others react to it with real hatred and indignation. Music never does that.

Consider the notorious Danish cartoons. For Christians, they were, at worst, in very poor taste, but they made some Muslims go on a murderous spree. Many Christians and Jews found them very funny. It is a good bet they would not feel that way about “Jesus cartoons.” A friend of mine created a set of cartoons about Jesus that he and I think very funny but he is reluctant to find a wide audience for them because he suspects that they would cause blind fury in viewers. In one of them, Jesus hangs upside down with one nail driven through his feet. He is swinging loosely on the cross. and a centurion is angrily telling the workmen, “I told you to begin with the arms.”

A certain regular reader of my posts reacted with annoyance to my remark that the old joke “What do you call 100 lawyers drowning in the bottom of a lake?……A good start” is actually quite funny. He retorted by asking me how I would feel about a joke that began, “What do you call a bunch of Jews asphyxiating in a gas chamber?” In supposing that the overwhelming majority of Jews would be very offended, he is surely right. However, jokes are not expected to have universal appeal and I think that Jews who are bothered by that one are not responding in any more justifiable way than Muslims are to cartoons that depict Muhammed disrespectfully.

Generally speaking, jokes are not the sorts of things that are either justifiable or unjustifiable. They tickle or they don’t, they cause anger or they don’t, they cause indifference or they cause mirth. We may say that they simply ARE.

Racist and ethnic jokes, when the audience is restricted to trusted friends, can signify that the joke teller feels sufficiently close to these people so that he need not worry about general societal norms. When the joke teller reaches out to a wider audience, he takes a risk. In all art and entertainment, risk-taking is essential to success. Nothing fails as much in these worlds as blandness. Chris Rock and a dozen other good black comedians understand that. And perhaps nothing is better than being the butt of one’s own jokes. Had Rodney Dangerfield’s jokes all began with “I know a guy who gets no respect. The other day, he…” the continuation would have been drab. It might have worked three or four times but Rodney milked his routine of self-deprecation for decades because he was smart enough to understand he had to be the butt of all those jokes. Centuries ago, the essayist Montaigne introduced his collection of essays with the wise observation that the most serious sin of any writer is to take himself too seriously. He even said to do so is unforgivable.

The best of our humorists are outrageous and daring, whereas TV comedy is awful precisely because it ranges from insipid to idiotic. If Animal House was funny it was because it was satiric and not itself an instance of the excessive partying in college that it parodied. It was never my cup of tea because I thought the satire was too broad and juvenile but I knew, too, that its stars were doing their best to appeal to adult audiences.

In the final analysis, if all our humor has to satisfy all tastes, then it probably will end up satisfying none. If all our humor has to be safe, then, in time, it will all end up in the trash bins and future sociologists of our generation will not be able to make sense of any of it.

Here is a riotously funny joke. A vicious anti-Semite is repeatedly kicking a Jewish man in the face and he screams at him “Don’t take this personally. I would kick every kike if I could.” Philosophers will appreciate this as a wonderful application of the principle of universalization.

Until the invention of modern day Israel, Jews played a small role in the history of the post-Jesus world. Muslims and Christians exist, by last count, in the trillions whereas you can almost count the number of Jews on the fingers of your cut off and incinerated hands. The slaughter of Jews has mostly been collateral damage. Or, better yet, occurs in periods of rest and recreation (R & R). Ever since Muhammed came on the scene, the real show has been Christians and Muslims killing one another. During the Crusades, more Christians and Muslims died than Jews have existed since the
Serpent said to Eve, “Wanna bite of my McIntosh?” The pace of Christian/Muslim killings has hardly slowed down.

Jews live in the conceit that the world is after them when the reality is that finding them is so hard that kicking them in the face is like finding a needle in a haystack. Far from suffering persecution at the hands of Christians, I was barely aware of their existence until I got to graduate school. My section of Brooklyn (Brownsville) was 99 and 44/100% pure Jew. I first heard the word “kike” when I was about 30. When someone called me that, I thought he was confused, since I assumed he mistook me for Italian. Brooklyn College in my day was “only” 75% Jewish but except for my meeting up with a few blacks on the school track team, I kept to my old Brownsville crowd. Only upon entering graduate school did I become fully aware that there were Christians everywhere. I didn’t much care then and don’t much care now. My wife, an Irish Catholic, is extremely ethnicity conscious and I can’t get the hang of it. Why she ever chose to marry a Christ-killer is beyond me. Why I married her is obvious: she is smart, rich and fun to hang around with but most of all I can beat her in a 100 meter dash by 85-90 meters.

So, next time you run across someone you think may be Jewish, call out to him and innocently ask, Hey, are you a Christ-killer?” If he is Jewish then, unless he is a damn moron, he will respond, “You betchum.”

Ny neighbors own some property in a NY suburb and decided to sell it. They called a realtor whom they had hired and asked, “How’s it going?”. He replied, “I’m working on it.” They had no clue as to what he meant.

My TV and internet connection both collapsed due to a storm. Days later I called the company for the fourth time, and someone told me, “We’re working on it.” I have no idea what that means.

The lights on the two lampposts in my driveway stopped working. I called the electric company that takes care of these things and was told “We’ll get right to work on it.” That was two weeks ago.

The University of Michigan promised to put JoEllen’s latest masterpiece into production with blinding speed because the head of the Press loved it so much. Every 4 months or so for the last two years, J calls to find out what is going on. As it happens, somebody always reassures her, “We’re working on it.”

Everyone of you has had that experience but I did something that made me a living legend. Ferdinand Schoeman, a hardworking, earnest philosopher, renowned more for being a nice guy than for his genius, died prematurely sometime in the early 1990s at age 47. In the spring of the year in which Ferdie died (or the following one – does it matter?) I got a phone call at 9 A.M.one day from a VIP of the American Philosophical Association:

VIP: Hi, Sid, this is…. Would you be willing to help us out? A few of us want to honor Ferdie for his accomplishments. We thought we should have a special session about his work at the next meeting of the APA. It’s an awful lot of work, I know, but would you take on the organizational details?

SG: Sure. What do you want me to do?

VIP: Really, all you need to do is line up 4 or 5 speakers for the event. We’ll arrange for the room and the day. Can you get back to me in, say, 2 or 3 months so that we have plenty of time to put an announcement in the Proceedings leading up to the meeting which, as you know, will be in late December.

SG: No problem.

At 10 A.M. I call the VIP: It’s done.

VIP (incredulously): What’s done? What do you mean?

SG: I’ve got the speakers, and they are all happy to be part of the program.

VIP: I’m flabbergasted. How did you do it?

SG: Well, I remembered the old saying, “Let your fingers do the walking” so I called a bunch of guys and they all accepted within 10 seconds or so. I spent another 2 seconds on the phone with chatter, “Great, See you at the Convention.”

Today, more than 15 years later, veteran members of the Association still speak of me with reverence and awe. “Do you remember the time Sid Gendin pulled out all the stops and arranged a program at the APA?” “You bet I do. What a guy.”

I think a plaque now hangs in the hallway of the entrance to the APA headquarters, commemorating my achievement. It says, “In appreciation of Sid Gendin. He worked on it.” The “it” itself is forgotten but I am immortalized.

On a certain comedy detective show I sometimes watched some 30 years ago, the hero was hired to find a missing person. Two hours later he told the person who hired him the address and phone number of the “missing person.” “Amazing! How did you do that?”, his employer asked. “”Oh, I looked him up in the telephone book.”

In any case, the great mystery concerning Google’s well-guarded phone number is now solved. My friend, Howard Pospesel, had the ingenuity to type the phrase “Google’s phone number” into the internet box for Google. Voilá. Up it popped! Hire this man!

In case you should ever need it: 650 253 0000. I hope Google doesn’t sue me.

I love this story. It is excerpted from the Ambrose Bierce website.

Ambrose and H.l. Mencken are sharing a limousine on their way to the cremation funeral of Percival Pollard in 1911. Like his two much more famous friends, Pollard was a witty, caustic critic of American culture.

As they were borne along, either Pierce said to Mencken or the other way around (I can’t figure it out):

“What’s cremation, after all, but the process by which the cold meats of humanity are warmed over? Once in the sacred town of Sacramento, California, the mourners gathered at a crematorium to bid farewell to one of their own, a ministerial figure of the particularly pious type. When smoke began to appear from the rafters, the mourners thought that somehow the proprietors of the crematorium had jumped the gun, had put the match to their late friend prematurely. When flames began to lick their toes they realized something was amiss. It was they who were on the pyre. They headed for the doors and windows, only to find all but one locked. There was such a crush at the only open exit that the surging humanity managed to plug it tight. It was a hot time in the old town, indeed. They were burnt to a crisp inside the crematorium. Thirty or forty of ‘em. Strangely, the dear, departed whom they had come to toast was singed not a bit. The corpse, in fact, had yet to arrive.”

This is the kind of cheery story that only those of the most lugubrious temperament will not be heartened by.

A man and his wife stop at a roadside hotel to get some rest for four hours. Upon checking out, the man is astounded to see the bill is $350. The clerk says it is the standard rate. The man demands to speak to the manager.

The Manager appears, listens patiently, and then explains that the hotel has an Olympic-sized pool and a huge conference center that were available for the couple to use.
‘But we didn’t use them.”
”Well, they are here, and you could have,” explained the Manager.

He went on to explain that they could also have taken in one of the shows for which the hotel is famous. “We have the best entertainers from New York, Hollywood and Las Vegas perform here,” the Manager says.

“But we didn’t go to any of those shows.”
“Well, we have them, and you could have,” the Manager replied.

No matter what amenity the Manager mentioned, the guest replied, “But we didn’t use it!” Eventually, he gives up and writes out a check.

The Manager is surprised when he looks at the cheque. But sir, this cheque is only made out for $50.00.”
”That’s correct. I charged you $300.00 for sleeping with my wife,” the guest replied.

“But I didn’t!” exclaims the Manager.

The guest replies, “Well, she was here, and you could have.”

Thanks for this joke to Leonard Carrier.

My mind is fading and it may be I’ve already circulated this one.

Ron and Jerry, two elderly friends, met in the park every day to feed the pigeons, watch the squirrels and discuss world problems.

One day Ron didn’t show up. Jerry wasn’t concerned; He thought Ron might have a cold or some urgent appointment.

But after Ron hadn’t shown up for a week or so, Jerry got really worried. After a month had passed, Jerry figured he had seen the last of Ron.

On his next visit to the park, however, Ron was sitting on their usual bench waiting for him.

Amazed and delighted, Jerry exclaimed, ”For crying out loud Ron, what in the world happened to you?”

Ron replied, ”I’ve been in jail.”

”Jail?” cried Jerry. ”You?! What on earth for?”

”Well,” Ron said, ”you know Tammy , That cute little blonde waitress at the coffee shop where I sometimes go?”

”Yes,” said Jerry, ”I remember her. What about her?”

”Well, one day she filed rape charges against me. At age 89, I was so proud that when I got into court, I pleaded ”guilty.”

”The judge gave me 30 days for perjury!”