Don't quit your day job, Lurch!

You ever wonder what Lurch will do if he loses the election? He's so bored with the Senate that he rarely shows up, and the surf and slopes can't always be right for extreme sports in goofy outfits. How about the comedy circuit? Jeff Jacoby has some some samples:

For some reason people are forever commenting on how dour and stiff Kerry is. But it's a bum rap. As anyone who has followed his career knows, the guy's a regular Jackie Mason.

Take his great quip about Saddam Hussein's military back in 1997, when he was advocating an expansion of the NATO no-fly zone. "The Iraqi Army is in such bad shape now," Kerry said, "even the Italians could kick their butts." Everyone split their sides, they were laughing so hard. Well, almost everyone.
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A year earlier, when Kerry was running for reelection, he uncorked a priceless rib-tickler about his opponent, Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld. "This guy," he said on Don Imus's radio show, "takes more vacations than the people on welfare." Is that a hoot? And yet, believe it or not, some people didn't think it was funny.
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Speaking of sophisticated comedy, have you heard the one about the camel and the ass? This must be Kerry's favorite joke, to judge from the frequency with which he told it during last year's primary campaign. Here it is, taken verbatim from his remarks to the Florida Democratic party convention in December:

"A little more than 5,000 years ago, Moses said, `Hitch up your camel, lift up your shovel, mount your ass. I will lead you to the promised land.' Five thousand years later, Franklin Roosevelt said, `Light up a Camel, lay down your shovel, sit on your ass. This is the promised land.' Today, George Bush will outsource your camel, tax your shovel, kick your ass, and tell you there is no promised land."

No doubt there are some grouches who would regard this as excruciatingly unfunny, not to mention an insult to FDR. ("Lay down your shovel, sit on your ass" was not exactly the motto of the Works Progress Administration.) But as any connoisseur of good humor will attest, you can't hear jokes like this even in the best comedy clubs.

He better not divorce Teresa just yet.