Would the chief play in the catskills? On the matter of Roberts and humor.

'HE has," said a television pundit, describing the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, "youth on his side."

Youth? I thought to myself. The guy is 50 years old. In Hollywood, where I work, being 50 almost qualifies a person for a handicapped parking spot. Out here, 50 means wisdom, grey eminence, and Omega-3 caplets. A 50-year-old man in Hollywood may have many things on his side--money, bright shirts, an expensive car--but youth is never one of them.

Washington, apparently, thinks differently. Of course, the Supreme Court, as I understand it, is some kind of lifetime gig--a permanent booking in the world's slowest-moving, least sexy legal drama--so in that sense, at least, 50 is pretty young. One look at his compact, fit frame and his hearty complexion and it's entirely possible to imagine a 90-year-old John Roberts still wielding the gavel. In other words, if he lays off the trans-fats, drinks green tea, and takes up yoga, John Roberts will end up having spent the vast bulk of his career--and in many ways, his entire life--at the very tippy-top of the professional ladder. Sort of like Ron Howard.

"He has," said another television pundit, describing the next CJ of the SCOTUS, "a terrific sense of humor. He's actually very funny."

Right, I thought to myself. Funny. Funny like Washington, D.C., funny? Funny as in Mark Russell funny? As in not funny at all? That kind of funny? Because every lawyer I know who is not right now wasting valuable billable hours torturing out a legal thriller is sweating over a sit-com pilot, and not one of them is very funny.

"It's a funny area," we say in the writers' room, during a script rewrite, when someone pitches a not-quite-funny joke. "Something like that," one of us will say, "but, you know, funny."

When working in the Reagan administration, Roberts spun out a memo commenting on the legality of an anti-drug comic book, paid for by the Keebler cookie company, to be sent to schools using government funds. "Asking us if we object to these subsidiary mailing issues," he cracked wise, "is like bringing a hippopotamus into the house and asking if we object to the small bird perched on its shoulder."

This, the New York Times insisted, was a sign of his "humor," which does a lot to explain Maureen Dowd.

Well, it's a funny area. But he's made some elementary mistakes.

In the first place, it's too long. All those syllables at the end--"asking if we object to the small bird perched on its shoulder"--just muddy up the timing and the rhythm of the line, and put unnecessary details way past where the punchline is supposed to be. And then there's the problem with the word picture: Who brings in the hippo? (And notice, if you will, how much funnier the word "hippo" is than "hippopotamus." Faster almost always means funnier.) Who is doing the asking, and the objecting?

What about something like: "Asking us if we object to these subsidiary mailing issues is beside the point. If a hippo comes crashing into your living room with a tiny bird on its shoulder, you don't complain about the bird."

Okay, not much better. But punchier, right? And the word "bird," which is probably the funniest word in the sentence, is at the end. Always, always, put the funny word last.

Another problem with the line--and, from my reading, a continual problem with the judge's prose--is the lack of any "k" sound. I tried to fix that by putting in the words "crash" and "complain," but that doesn't really save the day. "K" words, as Neil Simon teaches us in his last truly funny play, The Sunshine Boys, are funny words. In fact, the "k" sound can transform an unfunny idea--Pick an unfunny concept. How about, say, terminal illness?--into something potentially funny. "Lou Gehrig's disease" isn't funny at all. "Cancer," though, has definite comic possibilities. Add another "k" sound--"colon cancer," for instance--and you've got big laugh potential. How to make sure? Put the funny "k" word at the end of the sentence. It really can be that simple.

So what to make of a dissenting opinion from his time on the U. S. Court of Appeals, in which Judge Roberts argues that when police searched a car after discovering that its license plates were stolen they didn't violate the Fourth Amendment? "Sometimes," the judge wrote, "a car being driven by an unlicensed driver, with no registration and stolen tags, really does belong to the driver's friend, and sometimes dogs do eat homework, but in neither case is it reasonable to insist on checking out the story before taking other appropriate action."

My idea of career hell--aside from having to write jokes for Whoopi Goldberg--is having to punch up that sentence. There's no funny "k" word, no strong punchline, no set-up, and yet the Washington Post decided that it showed the judge's "wry sense of humor." Which explains David Broder.

Then there's the famous quip about women who give up homemaking to become lawyers. "Some might question," he lumbers out the set-up, "whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good." There was a brief flurry of triumph from left-wing agitators who felt that this, finally, was the sexist right-wing neo-anderthal they were looking for: Judge Roberts clearly thinks women should be chained to the house, vacuuming, and not out in the legal workplace, writing complicated employment regulations. It had to be explained to them by impatient right-wing bloggers that the judge was making a joke of the there-are-too-many-lawyers variety. Fine, but if you have to explain a joke, then it's not really a joke in the true sense of the word. A joke should explain itself as compactly and efficiently as possible.

The odd thing is, it's not like he doesn't know his way around the funny. When asked why he lost a case he argued in front of the Supreme Court by a vote of 9 to 0, he muttered, "Because there are only nine justices." Perfect. Short, mordant--and a thinker, too: The laugh comes a few seconds later, when you suddenly get his drift. And when commenting on a professor who was worried about being blacklisted because he once criticized a federal agency, Judge Roberts pointed out the social cachet of being ostracized: "Once you let the word out that there's a blacklist, everybody wants to get on."

Shorter, funnier. See how that works?

Of course, it's not at all clear why the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court should be funny--or worse, should try to be funny--in the first place. The best way to be funny, after all--once you get past the "k" words and the funny-bit-at-the-end rule--is to be surprising and unexpected and just a little bit irrational, which aren't usually thought of as terribly judicious traits. Funny people are by nature inconsistent and unreliable and impulsive, which is why there aren't very many truly funny chemical-weapons developers or high-school principals. Or, for that matter, Chief Justices of the Supreme Court.

Which is just as well. A funnier, punchier, "k"-word-using John Roberts would probably end up doing a lot of unexpected stuff on the Supreme Court, which is the last thing we need. So while it appears that the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has, unfortunately, a sense of humor, it's nice to know that it's not big enough or funny enough to pose a danger to himself or others, or that most humorless and unfunny of documents, the Constitution.