More Political Funnies

Who's ready to lose sympathy for some hot political others?!! Here goes: after his recent lecture and discussion of humor and national identity at an art museum here in Minneapolis, I was talking to a "visiting philosopher" about jokes in the Middle East. He relayed this chucklefest he heard from an Afghani colleague while he was doing work in Tunisia shortly after September 11th, 2001.

A woman walks into a bathhouse and is stopped at the door by an attendant who says "You can't go in here. This bathhouse is only for men." So the woman says to him she says "Is Saddam Hussein in there?" and the attendant says "no." So she says "O, is Osama bin Ladin in there?" and the attendant says "no." So the woman walks right in!

The joke is that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin are the only real men.

And then this was one of last week's "Maramduke"s: