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Show The Funny Business of Running for President This YEAR'S elections may the funniest ever. That's the prediction of many political experts who have - peeked into the smoky back rooms of the leading Presi- He who laughs last may not get elected That's why there's a gag writer behind every candidate dential candidates. What they see in every headquard ters ia a gag writer huddled with the shadowy, figure of the speech writer. Together they are honing the campaign's most potent weapon the cus--' political joke. "It's the age of specialization," explains Robert Orben, author of "The , Joke Teller's Handbook" and one of the most busily employed political gag writers. "In the past, one of the regular speech writers hopetully could work a laugh or two into the candidate's speech. Today that's not good enough. Now there's a humor specialist whose job it is to create jokes for the candiones for date and the opposition." By CLAIRE KELLER shirt-sleeve- long-famili- tom-ma- , ar de image-buildi- ng image-destroyi- Hr ng or some one-line-rs used by leading politicians: Gov. Ronald Reagan gets up and says: "I wonder what the 10 Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through a state President Johnson legislature." Vietto "We're ask the quips: going namese to send observers to our election this year." Richard Nixon warms up an audience with: "This is going n to be a hot race between five noncandidates." George Wallace " 'tells college hecklers: "I want to recommend a new book How to Behave in Public' " New York's Mayor John Lindsay says: "Whereas LaGuardia read funnies to the children, I read tragedies to adults." The other kind of joke aims at five-ma- Ronald Reagan . . . too vi funny t f 'Jiti ' I was not 'dirty politics.' A candidate is fair game and has to be able to rise above the jokes they tell about him." Some politicians, for example, can take a joke aimed at them and hurl it back with equal devastation. Barry Goldwate? was the butt of many 1964 jokes about his slogan: "In your heart, you know he's right." As the Vietnam war progressed, Goldwater turned the slogan joke against LBJ : "In his heart, he knows I was right." And Nixon has adapted a attitude in jokes to enhance his image: "They call me a dropout from the Electoral College flunked debating, you know." Although a candidate needs humor, sword. "It it can be a double-edge- d can be overdone," warns Dr. Ostberg. "Take the case of Adlai Stevenson. His wit became an end in itself. He got so much satisfaction out of people's reactions to his humor that he sometimes forgot the objective of wit, which should be to get the point across." There is another danger. "No one joke appeals to everyone," warns Dr. Ostberg, "so humor can splinter your audience." Harm is how a noted tv commentator and political analyst rates some of the potential candidates on their use of this political weapon. Ronald Reagan: "He overdoes it. On his recent swing through the country, he told too many jokes like, The hippies wear a button saying destroying a rival's image. No candidate would use these nasty remarks in his own speech but he doesn't mind if his aides make them up and circulate them. Here ars a few: "LBJ is an underachiever." "Bob Kennedy is really Bugs Bunny." "Remember Thomas Dewey? He's a Nixon who knew when to quit." There art compelling reasons why politicians have turned to the professional humorists for "ad libs" at airport press conferences or for campaign literature. As political commentator Walter Cronkite says, "One of the qualities of leadership in the modern world is a sense of humor. In John Kennedy's case, it was an integral part of his inspiration, his establishment of a national mood which is a problem today." In the age of tv politics, there is another reason. As Dr. Henry who heads one of the country's g largest research and organizations, explains, "Something humorous has a better chance of being picked up for the 11 o'clock news." A third reason is the knowledge of how cruelly devastating humor can be. As Walter Cronkite says: "There is nothing more harmful than being laughed at rather than laughed with. The joke can be about anything. Even that Nixon line (the one in the 1960 Presidential campaign which many felt influenced the election, "Would you buy a used car from this man?") Ost-ber- g, image-makin- Richard Nixon . . . f ) I iJL George Romney . kII . . cheerful? - r.. Q V make love, not war. They don't look as though they could do either.' " Eugene McCarthy: "He is solemn. He has wit, but he hasn't used it." George Ronney: "He is a cheerful man and doesn't need jokes." Lyndon Johnson: "It's hard to say about him. One day he is Bert Iahr; the day after that, he's Woodrow Wilson. But he does have a hearty sense of humor." George Wallace: "Too serious." Robert Kennedy: "Not in the same class as his brother Jack." Nelson Rockefeller: "Right now he's playing it coy, but he knows how to make people laugh." Th mor serious candidates remember Adlai Stevenson, who was humorous and lost, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was humorless and won. They can tell themselves quite rightly that it is not wise to try to be a political Bob Hope. "There's an inverse relationship between humor and the job you're running for," says Dr. Ostberc. "People will acalderman cept a jovial, but not a President" Still, the gag w. iters are busily at work. They know it is not the joke the candidate tells that matters so much. It is the jokes that are told about him and his opponents that can change an election. No candidate may have openly asked his writer for it, but surely each is hoping unconsciously that the humorist in the back room will come up with a line as devastating as the used-cone that helped deflate Nixon's hopes in 1960. "If you stop to think about your own views of a political candidate," says Orben, "you may realize that it's not arrived at from newspaper stories and speeches. Instead, you may well be judging him by the jokes you've heard." w joke-telli- ng ar Nelton Rockefeller fi i ialL-Jhiv- trr ... coy? iV,, |