Now that's not a cartoon.

The emotional and verbal aggression she inflicts has lost its strength and has become something of a joke.

I remember once he told me a story about a joke that the students played on him.

And there's another in joke among statisticians, and that's, How do you tell the introverted statistician from the extroverted statistician?

I'm sorry it was a cheap laugh, but I wanted to find a way to transition back to this idea of the unfolding apocalypse, and I thought that might do it.

He was brilliant, witty, fearless, an activist, a poet, a humourist, an intellectual, always questioning and challenging the status quo, always holding people to account, sometimes courting controversy but willing to suffer the consequences of his opinions and convictions.

First on my discovery list was Denise Bombardier, a journalist, novelist, essayist and media personality from Quebec, well known for her outstanding reporting and often scathing sense of humour.

In a recent joke, an interviewer asks Putin what happened to his favorite dog's puppies, whose birth he proudly announced during last December's parliamentary elections. They sank, he answers.

A joke making rounds in Moscow nowadays goes like this Americans didn't know who their President was two months after their last presidential election, but we Russians knew who was going to occupy the Kremlin two years before our recent election.

Veteran and author Paul Fussell explains the usefulness of the word during the war for creating effective propaganda by saying that Japs was a brisk monosyllable handy for slogans like 'Rap the Jap' or 'Let's Blast the Jap Clean Off the Map.

But listening to youth complain about the administrative obstacles faced when attempting to establish a company, we can't help but wonder whether the pitch for the start up week end créer une start up en 54 heures (create a start up in 54 hours) might be a silly joke by the schizophrenic government.

One instructor joked that although the Geneva conventions barred firing a 50 caliber machine gun at an enemy soldier an act defined as excessive force we could aim at his helmet or backpack, since these were equipment.