No Front-Runner So Far In the Contest for Laughs

· Adam McKay, co-founder with Will Ferrell of the Web site Funny

or Die (http://www.funnyordie.com) and director of "Anchorman: The

Legend of Ron Burgundy" and "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby":

For candidates, it's one thing if you make a quip while you're in a press conference or you are just a funny person. Before he was officially running, Barack Obama had a couple of funny comments just because they were so truthful.

But when they try to do comedy while campaigning it has to be so watered down, it ends up coming off cute, which just can't be funny. So maybe some 80-year-old in Iowa is chuckling, but it's never going to be genuinely funny. One of the conditions of comedy is it has to be subversive to be funny, and no candidate is going to be subversive. The whole beauty of the Web is that you can do things that are shocking and opinionated and dirty, and all of those things are things that candidates can't be. They're more like a priest making a joke at Christmas Mass about how the kids want to go home and open their presents.

· Peter Koechley, managing editor of the Onion:

None of the campaigns' attempts at humor are really landing. I think Bush has made our jobs harder and made it a lot harder for other candidates to be funny. When the stakes are so high, when there's so much real tragic news happening, it's hard to be lighthearted and funny. We're choosing a president who's going to have to decide what to do with Iraq. Bush has created a situation where it's hard to show a fun side. So Hillary's not trying to come off as really hilarious.