HARVARD CHALLENGES WORLD OF EDUCATIONAL COMEDY

MIT’s lead is safe. “For Now.”

Cambridge, Massachusetts (SATIRENEWSSERVICE) “How do we force women to wear burkhas? Torture their children if they don’t! How do we clear a mine field in war? Promise thirteen year old boys they’ll go to heaven if they get blown up! Why don’t we have enough money to help earthquake victims in Qom? Because we’re sending money to terrorists in Lebanon! Who are the most evil people in the world? The Jews, followed closely by the Americans! Why do we want nuclear weapons? To pursue our religion of peace, of course!”

These and other rapid-fire jokes were part of yesterday’s wildly successful comedy routine entitled “Tolerance in the Age of Violence” performed by former Iranian President Muhammed Khatami at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Khatami also fired off hysterical jokes about his regime’s treatment of women, gays, secularists, Baha'is, and student reformers.

But Khatami’s jokes and yarns were more than mere entertainment for the enthralled and receptive audience of Harvard professors and students. According to acting President Derek Bok, Khatami’s show represents “another step in our continuing efforts to make Harvard into one of the great comic institutions in America.”

To accomplish this ambitious goal, America’s oldest university has inaugurated a vast new program dedicated to bringing to its campus a broad range of comic geniuses with bizarre intolerance toward women, gays, ethnic minorities, Jews or Americans.

The humor program, tentatively titled “Nuttiness in the Age of Zealotry, Intolerance and Subjugation” will be headed by Harvard Professor Dr. Rudolph Hess (no relation), Ph.D. professor of Comedy, Philosophy and anti-American studies at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The Nuttiness Project will feature the usual leading U.S. comedians such as David Duke and Cynthia McKinney addressing their usual faux-serious topics.

But in an inspired move that may well thrust Harvard back into the top spot in academic comedy, the Nuttiness Project intends to invite world leaders such as Bashar Assad to speak on the topic “Magnanimity Toward Palestinians”, Mahmoud Amadinejad to speak on “Israel’s Right to Exist”, and Kim Jong Il to speak on “Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear.”

“Last year we lost a good deal of ground to Yale,” said Bok, referring to the side-splitting action of its Ivy League competitor in enrolling a Taliban spokesman as an undergraduate while banning the U.S. Army from its campus. “Yale’s move was comedic brilliance at a very high level,” said Bok.

But Harvard is trying. “The Summers affair helped us,” said Bok referring to the hilarious sacking of the former University President for daring to suggest that men and women may be different. “And Stephen Walt has helped a lot with his nutty book about Israel. But we need something more to keep up with our tremendous competition.”

Dr. Hess explained that prizes in the Academic Follies competition have never been stronger. “Why look, the University of Colorado hired a fake Indian to accuse the victims of 9/11 of being ‘Little Eichmanns’— that is pure comic genius. Brigham Young University has a fellow who asserts that the U.S. Government knocked down the twin towers. The University of Michigan has Juan Coles’ and his conspiracy theories. Those routines represent very high levels of comedy. And then there is the perennial leader, MIT.”

MIT, of course, has been at the top of academic comedy efforts for years due almost solely to the efforts of its resident Comedian-in-Chief, Noam Chomsky.

Harvard’s Bok acknowledges that the university’s comic reputation has been threatened in recent years. “Larry Summers did our program a great disservice by insisting that Cornell West quit writing rap music and go back to teaching. We lost West to Princeton. And our most visible public intellectual, Alan Dershowitz, often provides far too much serious thinking on important topics. But we are improving. And with the help of our Faculty of Arts and Sciences – we expect to become, yet again, America’s reigning academic farce.”