Political Humor

It was Friday night in the LA Cabaret in Encino and 50 people had paid good money to laugh at the republic. "Washington satirist Mark Russell says there's not enough caffeine in the country to keep us awake if it's Bush vs. Dukakis," comedian Carl Wolfson told the audience. "That's why I like Jesse Jackson. You know, Michael's brother. "Recently, he was asked if the war on poverty was over," Wolfson added. " 'Yes,' Jackson said. 'And the poor lost.'

Did you hear the one about President Chun Doo Hwan and four other guys in a submarine? You will here, along with variations involving a lifeboat and an airplane. But there is not a lot of political humor in South Korea, mainly because there has not been a lot of politics in nearly four decades of independence. The targets have been few, and skins have been thin.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Kremlin. During a National Press Club tour of the Soviet Union in 1985, H.J. Cummings and James Boren, founders (with their wives) of the Workshop Library of World Humor, decided to go off on their own to contact Soviet humorists and find out whether humor could bridge the cultural gap between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Comedian Argus Hamilton said his highest compliment came three years ago when Robin Williams introduced him at the Hollywood Comedy Store as "the Will Rogers of the Baby Boom." "Will Rogers is my idol," said Hamilton, 35. "And emulating him is the smartest thing I've ever done." Like the late political humorist of the Great Depression years and afterward, Hamilton is a down-home type whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather were Methodist ministers in his native Oklahoma.