Humour out of fashion in Ottawa?

The entire article is at the Star. If anything Dion is even less humorous IMHO than Harper. Sometimes Harper has some low key humour but on the whole he certainly lacks a funnybone. Dion seems no better. We need the Rhinoceros party again. The Marijuana party seems to have gone up in smoke or something.

Humour seems to have gone out of fashion in politics in Harper's Ottawa. It's difficult to explain why that's happened. Even political comedy isn't as funny or as popular as it once was. Several months back, a columnist in the Ottawa Citizen noted how veteran CBC comedian Rick Mercer isn't as funny as he used to be, because Mercer now cultivates celebrities instead of mocking them.

Perhaps it's the caution of the all-news, all-the-time age. Perhaps it's the triumph of "gotcha" journalism – a random remark, broadcast repeatedly out of context, can kill a political career. Self-deprecation, once seen as the highest form of political humour, just becomes ammunition for opponents. Certainly the media has a hand in this. Have reporters lost their collective sense of humour? Or do they just not allow politicians to have one?

There is probably a connection between humour and risk-taking. It takes a bit of recklessness to be funny, and recklessness is definitely not in style these days in politics. And this is a minority Parliament. The wrong thing said at the wrong time could set things in motion for an election that no one particularly wants right now.

But does that mean that things have to be so deadly serious and earnest all the time? Apparently so.

Harper is definitely not funny. A few of his cabinet ministers have a great sense of humour – Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg, Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl, for instance – but as we know, they're not allowed to appear in public, let alone do stand-up routines. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day is funny, especially in his occasional missives to constituents, but he can't help that.

Before he became prime minister, Harper had a bit of a sense of humour. He generally charmed that tough audience at the annual press gallery dinner with good-spirited impersonations of Liberal cabinet ministers and some gentle pokes at his own party's foibles.

But that's disappeared with the arch-discipline of Conservative power. Harper's idea of a joke now is to say something mean or dismissive about his opponents. He also thinks it's funny to make a joke about the media almost every time he appears at a press conference.

Compare that to former prime minister Brian Mulroney, who even in his darkest days of unpopularity could make jokes about himself.

Dion is similarly humour challenged. Unlike Jean Chrétien, the prime minister who brought him into politics, Dion isn't able to rouse crowds to anything but polite laughter, and usually that's a line that has been written for him.

Chrétien brought down the house at the Liberal leadership convention last December with his "can I call you Steve?" routine, poking fun at Harper's closeness to George W. Bush.

Dion, in contrast, stood straight-faced and polite this week as the tour guide on the whale-watching boat tried to lead the crowd in song and jokes. It often seemed his mind was elsewhere, though he was solicitous of his media guests on the boat and happy to answer any questions asked of him.

Had he ever done this whale-watching trip before? Yes, Dion replied enthusiastically: He had actually gone whale-watching on a SeaDoo, which offered one far more close commune with whales than this boat, where no whale was ever spotted – mostly because it was too late in the season. Dion said he had actually eaten a picnic lunch while on the water, with the whales frolicking about him. This was in Quebec, in La Malbaie.

When it came time to give a gracious little thank-you speech at the dinner after the boat trip, Dion tried for some spontaneous wit, but humour seemed a little lost on the crowd. The Liberal leader noted pointedly that he hadn't seen any whales and then announced – people weren't sure whether it was a joke or not – that next year's caucus would be in La Malbaie. It seemed an odd way to thank his hosts and pay homage to local pride – not least in a province whose major export to the rest of Canada has long been wit.

But this is, apparently, no time for humour in federal politics. Or, as Ignatieff said in the midst of that scrum last week: "That is the last thing I'm saying about puffins