DUDE, COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

As with September's memorial services for John McCain, expressions of mourning for George H.W. Bush -- extolling the 41st president's humility, loyalty, temperance, decency, bravery and devotion to public service -- have contained thinly veiled rebukes of the current president. The sharpest one, I thought, came in Alan Simpson's splendid eulogy at Washington National Cathedral.

"He never lost his sense of humor," the former senator from Wyoming said of his friend of more than 50 years. "Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life. That's what humor is. He never hated anyone. He knew what his mother and my mother always knew: hatred corrodes the container it's carried in."

Did Donald Trump catch any of this as he sat there in the first pew? Lindsey Graham, the episodically spineful Republican from South Carolina, has claimed that, in private, the 45th president is "funny as hell" and has "a great sense of humor." If so, it's a better kept secret than his tax returns.

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