Abstract
Abstract Humor in the news As part of an announcement that he and his siblings were honoring their parents by establishing a lecture series and research institute on humor in public life at Wichita State University, outgoing U. S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman presented “More than Comic Relief: The Importance of Humor in Public Life,” as his farewell speech to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He recommended self-deprecating humor as a strategic tool of the political trade, a means of puncturing pomposity, defusing tense situations, attracting allies, and even getting people to focus on serious policy issues. He told about his father's “weakness” for the pun…“I went to bed one night worrying about how the sun came up, but then it dawned on me.” and “The other night, I had a nightmare that I swallowed a muffer … the next morning I woke up exhausted.” His father had a collection of jokes “annotated and indexed on note cards,” and he regularly faxed jokes for his son to use in speeches. Many of them Glickman saw only in passing while his staff was on their way to the shredder because they “would've made even Earl Butz blush.”
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