Slip on This - How George W. avoids the banana peel.

Charlie Chaplin once explained that there are two ways to film the old guy-slips-on-a-banana-peel joke. The first, unfunny, way goes like this: Cut to the guy walking, oblivious. Cut to the banana peel, lying in wait. Cut to a wide shot of the guy approaching the banana peel. Cut to a closeup of the banana peel, just as the guy's foot hits it. Cut back to the wide shot, as the guy slips on the peel and lands on his rear end, which, as everyone knows from cartoons, is the funniest part of the human body and one that registers no real pain.

The second, funny, way to film that same sequence is as follows: Cut to the guy, walking. Cut to the banana peel, lying in wait. Cut to a wide shot of the guy approaching the banana peel. Cut to a closeup of the banana peel, just as the guy's foot almost hits it. Cut back to the wide shot, as the guy deftly steps over the banana peel, smiling smugly . . . and falls into an open manhole.

Get the difference?

Being funny, like being married or being president, is really just a matter of managing expectations. You make people expect you to slip on the banana peel. You lead them, through selective takes and camera work, to connect the dots just a few seconds ahead of the action. You flatter them, ultimately, into assuming that they've got it all figured out. And then you fall into an open manhole.

So let us stipulate, at the outset, that former vice president Dan Quayle is a man of average to slightly above-average mental capacity. He's probably a lot smarter than that, of course, but for the purposes of our discussion here, let's just leave it at "average." Let us further stipulate that President George W. Bush is also a man of average to slightly above-average mental capacity. Both, though, have slightly lower reputations in the smarts department.

Quayle attacked the problem in the most obviously logical way: He acted smart, gave smart speeches, stopped smiling so much, and in general tried to button up his persona. But there's only so much you can do to burnish your image when you're vice president of the United States. And the true effect of all of that image enhancement isn't to drain the funny out of the joke, it's to make it even funnier. What's funnier than a dumb guy trying to act smart? Imagine that, when you cut to the guy walking down the street, he's walking beside a pretty girl, trying to act cool and together. He's dressed up and acting suave and maybe acting a little tough, maybe showing off a little. Then he slips on a banana peel. You don't even need the open manhole. It stops being a joke about a guy and a banana peel, and instead becomes a joke about a guy pretending to be someone he's not.

I think it's fair to say of George W. Bush that although he's talented in many ways, he is incapable of pretending to be someone he's not. Aware of his own tendency to Cuisinart the English language, when he's got something important to say, he says it with index cards. When thoroughly rehearsed, he gives a good speech, but his teleprompter style is strictly phonetic-the words come out clearly, but the inflection is a little weird at times, and the line breaks come whenever the screen, or the index cards, need to go to the next page, sort of like: "We have communicated to the Chinese. Government and have expressed our desire. To see our servicemen and women return. With our aircraft to their families." I imagine that these are the sort of speeches a President e. e. cummings might make.

On the other hand, Bush is not setting himself up for a banana-peel experience. At the recent Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington, Bush did a killer 15-minute recitation of his most absurd statements-most read directly from a recently published political- attack book-and brought down the house. He really didn't add much extra material, either. He just walked up to the lectern, opened the book, read it out loud to his audience, threw in a few deadpan glances, and that was that. It was a neat example of efficient time management: Why bother coming up with new material when some liberal joke-book author has already written your speech for you?

It's not that you can't make fun of a guy who makes fun of himself, it's just that you have to come up with different reasons to make fun of him. Even now, barely four months into his presidency, the dumb-guy jokes about Bush seem pretty lame. For months, liberals have been setting themselves up for a fall: "Watch this guy slip on the banana," they've been crowing, "Watch this guy land on his butt." Since last autumn, liberals have been marching down the street announcing the arrival of the village idiot-"This is going to be so funny! Watch the fool be funny!" And they cheered so hard and shouted so loud, they completely missed the open manhole. Which is where they are now.

But not for long. If you can't make fun of a guy, then you must demonize him. So look, in the coming months, for "Bush the Impaler" and "Bush the Destroyer" themes to emerge from the liberal gaggle. (Barbra Streisand, always ahead of the curve, has already proclaimed him "destructive.") This is to be encouraged. One of the reasons Clinton skated so easily through his troubles was the ferocious and over-the- top hatred he engendered in his antagonists. And it's almost impossible to demonize a man you've already convinced yourself is an impotent fool-the effect is merely to drown out your true objections. Recall that during the Reagan years, liberals wanted us to believe two contradictory things. First, that Reagan was a sleepyheaded dunce who didn't have a thought in his head; and second, that he was well aware that a Defense Department procurement for weapons to be sold through Middle East arms dealers to Iran would generate a profit that could be diverted through an offshore shell corporation to another shell corporation controlled by a group friendly to the Nicaraguan contras. Liberals are still slipping on that particular banana peel.

So if making fun of George Bush isn't where the money is, where, then, is it? Comedy Central's new quasi-political offering, That's My Bush, provides one answer. The show has been billed as an outrageous satire- and it is outrageous, to the point of being not very funny-but it isn't really political. The conceit is kind of hard to swallow: George and Laura Bush (and, oddly, Karl Rove), in addition to serving their country in government, also serve their country as stars of their own sitcom. The result is uneven-but it isn't even remotely "liberal." The true joke here is the tired format of the sitcom. One episode trots out the old two-dates-on-one-night plot. George has promised Laura a romantic dinner for two, but he's also arranged a peacemaking dinner between abortion foes and abortion supporters. So he dashes back and forth between the two rooms, in a send-up of the most exhausted of sitcom cliches. At the end, though, when all is revealed and George and Laura are arguing about which of them is at fault, George says that maybe they both have a good point. And Laura responds, "Kind of like the abortion question." Which strikes me as the first time on American television that anyone-even in jest-has acknowledged that, with regard to abortion, both sides have a point. The show isn't conservative, of course-this is still America, this is still American television-but it certainly isn't an attack show, either. The show basically ignores politics to make fun of the last true faith of our contemporary culture: television.

For my money, the funniest show on TV is Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Consistently hilarious, consistently outrageous- and with the liberal whining kept to an absolute minimum-the show's true target is the news media. In highly clever ways, it skewers the high priests of American culture, TV news personalities. And television news-actually, the news media in general-are ripe for the picking: pompous, self-important, smug. You couldn't ask for a better cast of characters to set up for the banana-peel/open-manhole joke. I mean, if you're looking for someone to make fun of, don't pick the guy who's already let the air out of himself. Pick someone still bursting with hot gas.

That is, as it were, a no-brainer.