COMMENTARY : NOW, TAKE THIS IRANAMUCK CRISIS--PLEASE!

Mark Russell on Ronald Reagan, to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”: My Ship of State’s having rough sailing,

My trickle down’s soggy and thick,

My 3x5 memory is failing,

My Teflon is starting to stick.

There are a number of people here who have been quoting President Reagan’s contention that the Iranian- contra arms sale scandal (unofficially known as Iranamuck , though everybody seems to name a different name for it), is strictly a philosophically hermetic “beltway issue” (the beltway is the freeway that encircles Washington).

But as it turns out, rumor and report have escaped Washington with infinitely greater speed than the majority of commuters and hapless tourists enmeshed in the purgatorial labyrinth of its street system.

It may not be surprising that the Gipper has fumbled again. What’s surprising is the delayed reaction on the part of the humorists, comedians and party wags in sending up the whole carload of official evasion. An informational inversion layer has settled over the White House. The game now is whose level of information is closest to ground zero in the latest Administration motto: He who knows least survives best.

As satirist Mark Russell puts it, “William Casey said he learned about it (the arms sale and diversion of funds) from Bryant Gumbel. George Bush learned about it from Peter Jennings. George Shultz still doesn’t know about it; he still thinks the Shah can’t hang on.”

But not many people are having fun with it. The humor is there, but you have to dig for it, or listen especially hard. There have been joke contests on a name-that-scandal game-show motif that have produced titles such as Gippergap and Ayatollah-so, and some instant standards have entered the currency, such as. . . .

Q: What’s the difference between a day care center and the National Security Council?

A: A day care center has adult supervision.

Q: How many White House aides does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: None. They like to keep Reagan in the dark.

But generally speaking, a deep silence underscores the reaction on the part of the public and the more-or-less professional observers and commentators who are given to dissecting every current and nuance of government affairs. One of the most cryptic lines this observer heard was delivered by a waitress in a local trendy eating spot, Rumors, who dropped off the dinner check and the comment, “The White House is just like this restaurant.” Asked what she meant by that, she shrugged and moved on. The blank expression on her face discouraged further inquiry.

Humor is familial. When you can joke about something, you draw chaos into the realm of the manageable. The pattern in Washington, for whoever gets beyond the level of dismay, is to toss off one or two one-liners and then come up against the hard rock of the inexplicable: Is the Reagan presidency and its resurrection of monumental hope on the part of the American people about to collapse?

Mark Shields, columnist for the Washington Post and an oft-quoted observer, is characteristically two-edged. Shields quipped in an interview with Calendar, “Time moves so much more quickly these days that tomorrow George Bush will pardon Reagan.” (Variations of this joke have been making the rounds.) “I don’t think Reagan intends to resign,” Shields said. “He’s left a wake-up call for January.”

And: “For Reagan to consult with Nixon is like getting marital advice from Henry VIII.” And: “The tension is causing Reagan sleepless afternoons.”

“I think one of the reasons it’s hard to joke about this situation,” Shields said, “is that William Casey is seriously ill and Reagan’s about to be hospitalized. Everything’s on hold. Also, for humor to work, there has to be a clear perception, such as the ego of Kissinger or the girth of Ted Kennedy. We don’t have that right now.

“On a deeper level, I think there’s no way to assess at the moment what these revelations mean to the public mind. Ronald Reagan was on the verge of becoming the first President since Eisenhower to successfully complete a two-term presidency. He gave us the image of someone who was comfortable with himself, and 49 out of 50 states voted for his doctrine. Now, since he’s made anti-terrorism a hallmark of his presidency, and we see who was responsible for the blowing up of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and then find that Reagan’s selling arms to the Ayatollah--I think that leads to a terrible feeling of let-down.”

Said Dick Drain, a writer and political consultant for CBS: “I think the situation’s moving so fast that there’s no way to get a fix on it. My experience is that national calamities induce dismay for a short time, but eventually you find the jokes. A lot of people are finding this situation potentially funny because it’s so screwed up. Of course, I’m talking about Democrats. Obvious targets include Oliver North, anything about shipments to Iran and Ronald Reagan as a part-time President. Reagan has always been a target. Not Nancy, though. Some things are mysteriously off-limits. Nancy’s one of them.”

One of the Democrats in the fold of Drain’s estimate is Francis O’Brien, an aide to Geraldine Ferraro, who observed, “It’s not true that Donald Regan had a pre-nuptial agreement to put his personality in the family trust.”

The club comedians are dismally uninspired on the subject. To call the Washington comedy clubs mediocre would signal overpraise. Ponderously dilatory comedians with no wit, stage presence or performance skills stand up like class clowns at a beer bust to talk about McDonald’s and the sexuality of whoever’s in the house with the same self-referring vulgarity you hear in Chicago, New York or Houston. Stand-up comedy has become tantamount to a floating continental stag party, filled with TV-generation comedians to whom place means nothing--let alone ideas.

“The ‘80s is worse than the ‘50s,” observed Danny Danziger, 29, who performs under the name of Danny Stark. “It’s entropy. I bring a chick home. She sees ‘Power, Politics and People’ by C. Wright Mills on my bookshelf and says, ‘What’re you, a Communist?’ ”

Danziger, a Mort Sahl devotee, is so sour on his audience’s lack of interest in current events that he aborts his own act.

“The future of America is its young people,” he says to his predominantly young audience. “As you can see, there’s no future.”

If Danziger were given the Weltanschauung of New York or Los Angeles, he would consider himself a performance artist. In Washington, with its racial and social gyroscopes spinning out of touch with each other, Danziger is an artist manque.

Joan Cushing writes and stars in a satirical revue at the New Playwright’s Theater called “Mrs. Foggybottom and Friends” that sends up Washington social mores. She observed: “Washington is such a political town; people don’t live here, and therefore there’s no sense of loyalty about what goes on. People are mainly interested in themselves. I’ve seen politicians come in to where I’m entertaining and spend the whole time shaking hands, making sure people see them.”

Her best joke on the current situation: “Reagan shouldn’t be so against firing his staff. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s dismissed non-essential federal workers.”

“When William Casey was operated on,” said Frank Mankiewicz, who was press secretary for Robert F. Kennedy and now works for a Washington public relations firm, “people said: ‘Leave the tumor! Take the brain!’

“Aside from that, I’m seeing that the good horse laugh isn’t coming out of this situation. There are some funny things here. Nobody’s got it yet that Oliver North is a joke. I think it’s funny that a congressman is willing to kick in $200 for North’s defense fund--nobody offered that to Jeb Magruder. After all, nobody was killed at Watergate.

“I think people are horrified at the idea that Reagan has been helping the Ayatollah. About three months into the presidency, Clark Clifford said about Reagan, ‘He’s an amiable dunce.’ We’ve been able to live with that, but now the situation has taken a turn that’s very bad for Ronald Reagan. People are feeling, ‘If he hasn’t been out of touch, then he’s a liar.’ In either case, he’s in a no-win situation.

“I think the delayed reaction too is because the Washington Post didn’t break the story--it was broken by a third-rate Lebanese publication.”

Why is it that no one can joke about Ronald Reagan without sounding cruel? After all, the humor that attacked his predecessors Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson (nobody had to joke about Gerald Ford; his unwitting presence afforded enough humor on its own) was not only a convention of traditional caricature and sizing up, but it was a humor of dissociation.

Our contemporary political process, it seems, doesn’t necessarily deliver the best man to the chief executive’s office. LBJ was duplicitous about Vietnam and came off in the media like a cross between a snake oil salesman and a backwater pol. The press had great fun provoking Nixon’s peevishness and frustrating his attempts at self-justification (no wonder he hated the press; he could never get the upper hand).

Carter is remembered as a gifted engineer who brought the wrong resume to a job that required statesmanship. And he had virtually no sense of humor--a crippling failing in Washington, where humor acts as a lubricant between grinding power factions; no one is beyond its measure (the Washington press corps even jokes about itself, “If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, let’s hear it”).

One other thing: All these presidents failed not only in having been mired in the exigencies of their time and overexposed in their missteps by the mass media, but because none of them could mobilize an electorate to superlative ideals the way John F. Kennedy could.

Kennedy’s early death conferred on him an ironic immortality. He was the last public leader to quicken a mythic impulse in the public imagination. He also prized wit and generated a sense of bonhomie that’s still attached to his image (even his startling peccadilloes are treated jovially). After him, every pretender to the American throne seemed an old guy in a suit.

Where Kennedy was the paradigm of the American cosmopolite, Reagan has been the paradigm of the cowboy, the principled, hard-working visionary, the kind of earnest blue-eyed figure that could gather his family before the easel of Norman Rockwell (that’s how he’s seen abroad as well).

Everyone knows Reagan’s professional faults. No one likes to see him maligned, however, because he’s somehow successfully crossed over into the American self-image of perpetual youth, sentimentality and plain-spoken hopefulness; to attack him is to vilify a bit of oneself.

Mark Russell claims that anything is fair game: “You say no one can talk about Nancy? Hell, when she got her $200,000 White House china, I said: ‘The good people have the plastic dishes and the plastic people have the good dishes.’ ”

In his latest routine, Russell quips, “This is not another Watergate. There is no smoking gun. We sold it to Iran” and “The real question is, ‘What does he know, and does he really know that he knows it?’ ”

In a conversation later, Russell sounded sanguine. “The truth is, everybody’s been having a good time with this, even the conservatives. We’ve been so self-satisfied for six years that something like this is welcome. In March, at the Gridiron Club, Ronald Reagan will be leading the laughter.”

By March, we’ll know whether this is a sound prediction, or whether the news is “Ayatollah-the-worst” for our second president in a row.