I sometimes wonder if John Kerry is like one of the kids in Half Magic, the children’s book by Edward Eager in which some half-lucky kids get half of what they wish for: instead of landing on a desert island, one of them wishes himself onto a desert etc. (That’s the basic idea behind the old Peter Cook-Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled as well, except there it is Satan, played deliciously by Cook, who keeps tricking the mortal Moore). Don’t you think Kerry went to bed last week wishing he could be on the front page of the newspapers again? And two years ago, isn’t it possible he wished with all his might that he could be his party’s nominee when faced with the most incompetent president in modern history as an opponent? (No one said that meant winning.)

In the wake of the botched joke scandal a reporter asked him if he should go to joke school. A contrite Kerry answered in the affirmative. Sad to say that this stupid contretemps has made international news. My friend Josh Rushing, who is in Qatar for the launch of Al Jazeera International, was interviewed by his own network about it yesterday. As a former Marine, reporters wanted to know if Kerry had offended the troops. What it offends is our intelligence, he told them; truly stuck in Iraq, our administration is desperate to talk about anything but. Including the Senator from Massachussetts and his unlikely second act as a stand-up.

Josh told me it reminded him of a joke his son Luke tried to make once at a dinner party in West Hollywood. Most of the people at the dinner table were gay and I guess Luke, in that awful age when preadolescent boys feel they must push whatever envelope they can find, thought he would try out some outre material. Josh remembers rescuing him from some lame routine about Christ on the crucifix wearing only a Speedo that must have seemed hilarious in his bedroom. “To this day it is the most embarrassing thing I can mention to him,” says Josh.

I remember my own son, Adam, at that age, throwing out malapropisms and show-stoppers when he most needed a friend. On Block Island one summer, fresh from watching a spate of old crime films with his dad, Adam tried to win some new friends by asking a young boy and his sister where on the face they wanted to be punched. They stared at him agog, even after he said, “That’s from Popeye. Popeye Doyle. The French Connection.” I remember the sound of silence, distant coughing, crickets in the distance as I led him off, suggesting that these kids might now know cop flicks from the seventies…

But would you rather have a president who can’t tell a joke or a president that is one? A college graduate who can at least try and joke about military service because he actually served in active combat, or a college graduate who did everything in his power to avoid going to war but feels no compunction about sending others into what is looking more and more like an endless conflict?

Who’s kidding who?