Humor

AMILD-MANNERED Comcast ad spoofing the TV show "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" is insulting to gays and lesbians according to Rita Addessa, executive director of the Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Task Force. She said, "Clearly, the message is that gay men are effeminate and care only about fashion . . . This is simply not reflective of the community. It is a tired old stereotype. " Unfortunately, knee-jerk complaints like Addessa's tend to reinforce the tired old stereotype that activist lesbians have no sense of humor.

Bobby is a friendly 16-year-old with a great sense of humor. He is a pleasant young man who usually keeps to himself. However, though he can be an introvert at times, he works well with others and enjoys socializing with his friends. Bobby is skilled at using computers and playing basketball and football. Other favorite pastimes include watching television, singing and dancing. Enrolled in the 10th grade, Bobby likes going to school, where he receives individual attention in a classroom with a small number of students.

Competitive and athletic, Docquez, 14, dreams of becoming a professional athlete one day. Baseball is his favorite sport, though he is also a talented basketball player. Known as Doc to his friends, Docquez has a great sense of humor. He loves listening to music and enjoys singing along with the artist. He also enjoys playing video games and working on the computer. Docquez takes part in a residential therapeutic program to help him cope with behavioral challenges and to focus his attention more effectively.

E-mail is changing the way we disseminate jokes and funny stories. In this regard, it has replaced the faxes and telephones of just a few years ago. But are we - thanks to the new-found ease of forwarding the latest jokes all over the planet - losing touch with our inner funny bone? The Internet and e-mail have led to the almost instantaneous spread of information. With very little effort I can reach out to my sister, cousins, long-distance friends - and my coworkers 10 feet down the hall.

He might be the most droll songwriter in indie-pop, and on songs like "Waiting for Kirsten" from last year's EP An Argument With Myself or "I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots" from his new album I Know What Love Isn't , the Swedish singer can be a veritable laugh riot. But don't get the idea that Jens Lekman is not a serious man. "I like telling stories with a sense of humor," says Lekman, who will play a show with his band at Union Transfer on Thursday night. "But humor can also distance you from the subject you're writing about.

As Julius kneels on the rug holding a small car, he's asked where the starting line is. "Over there," he says, pointing. The competing cars are lined up and the race is about to begin. Then Julius shows his sense of humor by sitting on the other cars so his will be the one to win. He beams when there's laughter, as he loves positive attention. Julius, 4 1/2, is doing well in preschool classes. "He has mild developmental delays," his worker says. "He's functioning on about a 3-year- old level.

Roz Warren loves to check her mailbox. And who could blame her? Tucked among the usual bills and junk mail might be found a knee-slapper or two. Every day, cartoons, essays and stories are sent to her from women across the country - and a few from around the world - in the hopes they might be included in one of the anthologies of women's humor that Warren has edited. Her first book, Women's Glib, a collection of feminist cartoons, essays and poems, was published in 1991. Its sequel, Women's Glibber, will be out in the fall, and her newest book, Kitty Libber, cartoons about cats by women, were to be available by today.

Advance publicity surrounding the season premiere of "Murphy Brown" having fallen just short of "who shot J.R. " hyper-hype, the impending arrival of last night's show brought on physical sensations akin to morning sickness. Like Frank Fontana told the country's most famous fictional unwed mother in the second half-hour, we were thinking, "Murph! It's Dan Quayle! Forget about it!" Of course Diane English and company didn't. Given the unprecedented weirdness of the vice president of the United States making a sitcom character a campaign issue, they couldn't.

It takes a while to get used to what is going on in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, the current production of the South Jersey Regional Theater. Here are the parents of a girl so severely handicapped that she's almost in a vegetative state, and they're making jokes about it. Soon, however, it becomes obvious that it is by laughing that they manage to cope - laughing not so much at their daughter, Jo, whom they call Joe Egg, but at the cruel misfortune...

THERE ARE MANY kinds of desperation, as many as the stars above and the souls beneath them. The death of a child, the disintegration of a marriage, homes lost to floodwaters and whirlwinds, all of these things can drive you to - and beyond - the point of suicide. And yet, there are sources of strength as varied as the sorrow. For one man, that source was found in unwritten words, tapped out on prison walls and shared with his captured brothers in Vietnam. Major Gen. John Borling, a 6 1/2-year "guest" at the infamous Hanoi Hilton is, like Joyce Kilmer and Wilfred Own, a soldier-poet.

LOS ANGELES - The day starts out light for the La Salle Explorers as coach John Giannini knows the value of rest, especially at this time of the season. The team isn't required to be anywhere until a 10 a.m. breakfast in the basement of their hotel. While a lot of food does get consumed, the session primarily consists of laughter. Tyrone Garland, owner of the now-famous Southwest Philly Floater, cracks everyone up with some witty - and secretive - one-liners. His main audience is Ramon Galloway, who stands up to laugh loudly after a Garland quip.

To succeed, every story needs to find its readers. Unfortunately, "the biggest problem with being a writer is that all your readers are human beings. " If that sort of barb-laced quip appeals, keep reading. Theresa Rebeck's smart, sharp Seminar , presented by Philadelphia Theatre Company at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, shows four aspiring novelists enrolled in the private weekly workshops of rock-star literary editor Leonard (Rufus Collins). During these sessions, Leonard tears through their manuscripts with overt insults, undisguised flirting, and vague compliments.

YOU HAD TO STEP pretty quickly to keep up with Charlene Rubin Menkin. She set a brisk pace despite having limited use of her limbs from a childhood bout with polio. But whether being helped along with a cane or, later, with a motorized scooter, Charlene wasn't about to restrict herself in any way. She taught high school, traveled extensively and was the life of any party. "When she would come into any room, people just flocked to her," said her daughter-in-law, Darlynne Menkin.

YOU HAD TO STEP pretty quickly to keep up with Charlene Rubin Menkin. She set a brisk pace despite having limited use of her limbs from a childhood bout with polio. But whether being helped along with a cane or, later, with a motorized scooter, Charlene wasn't about to restrict herself in any way. She taught high school, traveled extensively and was the life of any party. "When she would come into any room, people just flocked to her," said her daughter-in-law, Darlynne Menkin.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Hedgerow Theatre serves up the world premiere of Larry McKenna's Strictly Platonic , a cute, chocolate-covered cherry of a romantic comedy. McKenna's 11-scene, 90-minute script wastes no time setting up its well-worn premise: It poses the life-altering question, "Do you ever look for meaningful relationships?" The recipient of that question invariably is a self-centered, shallow playboy, in this case, real estate agent Tim (Brendan Cataldo). We meet him in the first scene as he rides home on the train from a night of bar hopping - and phone-number scoring - with his best friend, Josh (Jamie Goldman)

Hypocrites never mind a mirror that flatters. This alone explains the theme, if not the success, of Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse's musical Jekyll & Hyde . Bricusse's book turns Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll (Constantine Maroulis) into a do-gooder doctor seeking to cure his criminally insane father and liberate humanity from its evil nature. Hypocritical authority figures (priest, dowager, general, politician, judge) stand in Jekyll's way, each protecting his or her vices by impeding the doctor's work.

"Money doesn't make you happy. "But it sure buys you a better class of misery. " That joke, and thousands more, came from the mouths of top-drawer comics. But they were hatched in the overactive, irrepressibly silly, charmingly warped, and unfailingly funny mind of Sol Weinstein. A once-destitute Jersey boy who honed his gift for gags while banging out obituaries at the Trentonian, he rode a wave of laughs all the way to Hollywood. From the late 1950s into the '80s, he spun shtick for such legendary comedians as Joe E. Lewis and Bob Hope; wrote for The Love Boat , The Jeffersons , Three's Company , and Maude ; composed a signature song for Bobby Darin; and fathered James Bonds' Yiddish alter ego, Israel Bond, filling four popular books with the exploits of Agent Oy-Oy-7.

After seeing Montgomery Theater's production of Sean Grennan's Making God Laugh , I think biblical standards of humor have declined a bit since Job's time. Grennan's play spans 30 years, beginning at Thanksgiving 1980 and progressing through Christmas 1990, New Year's Y2K, and Easter circa 2010. On each of these holidays, a trio of siblings learn the painful lesson that you can't go home again. The audience, watching the characters' lives move from youthful promise to adult discontent, gets beaten over the head with Grennan's continual insistence on his theme: If you want to make God laugh, create plans, so he can delight in frustrating them.

On the speaking circuit of 19th-century America, no one commanded greater audiences than Mark Twain. The author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer crisscrossed the country, reading his books to sold-out crowds. Wendy Bable's Mark Twain: Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburgers builds on this. She sets her play in 1904, the self-proclaimed last lecture of Twain's first annual final farewell tour. This sets the tone for the evening: a bit whimsical, with a hint of Twain's sardonic, bubble-bursting humor.