1. When you tell vicious racist jokes, you should first announce that you were a liberal back when it was legal to be one.

2. Men have a certain body part that women do not have, and men always think jokes about it are a stone riot, but if you tell such a joke to a woman, she will look at you as though you are a Baggie filled with mouse remains. I don’t know why this is, but it never fails. So you want to avoid this particular type of joke in coeducational social settings such as Windsor Castle.

3. If, after you tell a joke, somebody attempts to tell you one back, you should keep assuring him that you haven’t heard it, and then, when he gets to the punchline, no matter how funny it is, you should react as though he just told you the relative humidity and say: “Yeah, I heard that.”

4. Never attend a large dinner party with my former mother-in-law, because she will shout across the table at you: “Tell the one about the man who’s seeking the truth and he finally gets all the way to Tibet and the wise man tells him that a wet bird doesn’t fly at night,” and then she’ll insist that you tell it, and then she’ll tell you you told it wrong, and you might have to kill her with a fork.

Snews

Readers are sometimes critical of me because just about everything I write about is an irresponsible lie. But now I’m going to write a column in which everything is true. See how you like it.

Our first true item comes from a news release from the j I Case company. For the benefit of those of you who have real jobs and are not involved in the news business, I should first explain that a news release is an article that has been typed up by a public-relations professional hired by a client who wants to get certain information published, which is then mailed out to several thousand newspapers, almost all of which throw it away without reading it. If you ever commit a really horrible crime and you want to keep it out of the papers, you should have a public-relations professional issue a news release about it.