If you're going to tell a joke ... try to get it right.

A FEW seasons back, on HBO's magnificent series The Sopranos, mob boss Johnny Sack hears through the grapevine that some of the guys have been making fun of his wife. She's got a weight problem, see--she's a big girl--and apparently one of the guys, over a game of poker, made some kind of smart remark. A joke or something. So Johnny goes to Carmine, the boss of the New York operation, referred to by the Jersey crew, using low and meaningful voices, as simply New York, and he asks Carmine to sanction a hit on the guy who told the joke, Ralph Cifaretto. Carmine is nonplussed. What was this joke, anyway? he asks. So Johnny Sack with great difficulty retells the joke he heard that Ralph Cifaretto told some guys about how fat his wife is: Someone at the poker game mentioned that Johnny's wife went to see a doctor, and Ralph then says, apparently, "Yeah, she's getting a 90-pound mole removed from her a**."

Carmine looks up from his espresso with a quizzical expression. He clearly doesn't understand the joke. So Johnny has to explain it, painfully: The implication here, he tells Carmine, is that my wife is so fat that her rear end could conceivably sustain a 90-pound mole. Carmine continues to look baffled, and eventually decides to sanction a hit on Johnny.

You see, if you find yourself explaining a joke, for whatever reason, it's best to stop before someone gets hurt.

So when Dana Milbank, the Washington Post reporter who appeared on an MSNBC talk show to discuss the Dick Cheney accidental shooting--do we have a name yet for this event? something pithy and sharp? Quailgate? Birdgate?--arrived dressed in hunter's orange, I wanted to look up blankly from my espresso. Yeah? And?

He got a lot of flak for it, apparently. The Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, tut-tutted him for his insensitivity, or the appearance of bias, or maybe the appearance of insensitive bias, mostly because at the time Milbank made his appearance, the elderly victim of Cheney's errant blast, 78-year-old Texas lawyer Harry Whittington, was still in somewhat dicey condition.

Not funny, was the general reaction to the wardrobe gag, the guy's still critical. But that, of course, misses the point. It wouldn't have been funny no matter what. Forgive me for turning a professional's eye to a silly appearance on an insignificant cable-news talk show, but, um, I don't get it. He's wearing orange to refer to recent events, right? And that's funny because ... ?

A joke, see, has two crucial parts: It has a set-up ("Johnny Sack's wife is going to the doctor") and a punchline ("Yeah! To get a 90-pound mole removed from her a**!")--and without those two items, it really isn't a joke.

On my first day of my first job in television, a young staff writer on the long-running show Cheers, I was told that any beer joke would have to be filmed twice, once for the audience and once again alter the audience left the soundstage. The trouble was, any time the word "beer" was mentioned in a set-up-ish context, the audience would start laughing, anticipating that the Norm character, a beer-loving layabout, would have something funny to say. So we were getting laughs on the setup part of the joke, which would drown out the punchline part, which meant we needed to film them twice, for the soundtrack and the timing. In a way, it's a good problem to have--an audience so tuned in to your characters that you no longer have to do any real joke writing. It's all just setup. The audience plays the punchline in their heads.

Which is what Dana Milbank was doing. And what a lot of conservatives did during those Technicolor[TM] Clinton years. There would be lots of talk about cigars and blue dresses but they never really added up to an actual, repeatable, writedown-able joke. it was always just ho-ho-ho, get the reference?

Of course, those were partisan jokes told by partisan joke-tellers--not weird costume bits by, ahem, respected Washington Post journalists, who, we are routinely told and rotely scolded, are totally unbiased recorders of contemporary events.

But suddenly everyone jumped down Milbank's throat about it, so the left-wing perspective on Cheney's accident quickly turned from ludicrous white men shooting each other to drunk, sinister gun nuts' perpetrating black-ops. Which is, let's be frank, more in keeping with the current drift of the left wing, but isn't really all that helpful when you're trying to win a lot of congressional races in the autumn. Silly rich white guys, out of touch with real Americans, gallivanting around Texas ranches, blasting each other with birdshot, could be a compelling populist message. Why Cheney didn't issue a press release twelve hours earlier ... isn't.

Years ago, on one of my canceled television shows--well, they've all been canceled, so to be specific I should say that this was my first canceled show--we did a joke about a character who had a philosophical attitude toward relationships. "When you're a young man," he tells the other characters, "you play the field, you date a lot of women, you know, you get around. But at a certain point, you reach the age when you're ready to settle down, to make a commitment, to give yourself to one person, and you do the mature thing, the right thing, and you fly to the Philippines and you buy yourself a wife."

Okay, not a killer joke, I admit, but it did the job: People laughed and we were out of the scene. A month or two later, though, we received a sternly worded letter from some watchdog group reprimanding us for turning an offensive ethnic slur into a bad joke. Did we realize how hurtful and outrageous and offensive we had been? (We didn't.) The letter wound up to its big finish: Were we even aware, it screeched, that the Philippine government had outlawed mail-order brides in the early Nineties'?

Our show was broadcast in early 1995. We had missed the cutoff, apparently, by 18 months. If only we had reshuffled our post-production schedule and broadcast that episode earlier, no harm done. But we hadn't, and so the joke was broadcast slightly past the secret deadline, which meant that the entire creaking placating machine had to be fired up: Studio publicists wrote soothing letters in response (the character who uttered those offenses is the "lowlife" guy; he's the butt of the joke; we were critiquing his point of view, see; we were giving voice to the outrage of mail-order bride buying through humor; we're all on the same side!) and got some I-refuse-to-be-placated answers back, and the joke was parsed and re-parsed and re-re-parsed by dozens of professionals in the apology and outrage businesses until finally, a few months later, the show was canceled and the caravan moved on.

The trick, though, was to get us to explain the joke. The minute the publicist entered into that awful dance, we were sunk. We were Dana Milbank in that orange vest, looking stupid and creepy and wrong-footed. We were Johnny Sack in Carmine's office, explaining how fat, exactly, people think our wife is. That's Carmine's masterstroke on that episode of The Sopranos. He makes Johnny tell the joke, and then he pretends not to get it. Of course he got the joke--that fat broad is getting a 90-pound mole? Removed from her a**? That's funny stuff, and you can bet Carmine laughed about it later. But then, Carmine, unlike Dana Milbank, has no ax to grind. He's free to laugh.

Mr. Long writes NR's Long View, and is the author, most recently, of Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke.