All the Quayle Jokes Have You Bushed Yet?

What do you get when you cross a hawk with a chicken?

A Quayle.

If there’s anyone in America who hasn’t heard this joke yet, it’s a minor miracle.

Practically from the minute he was named to run on the Republican ticket last week, vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle--a relative unknown saddled with questions about his past and a succulent name--has become a favorite dish of the nation’s humor chefs. Special of the day? The Quayle roast, of course.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To join the National Guard.

Not since former Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart was boiled alive in a vat of off-color jokes has a politician been peppered with so many attempts at humor. The difference this time around is that many of the jokes about Quayle--OK, maybe they aren’t that funny--are printable in a family newspaper.

Hart, remember, had his political goose cooked in a sex scandal involving Donna Rice and a yacht named Monkey Business. Quayle’s trouble is generally less sexy, mainly involving whether strings were pulled to help him avoid the Vietnam War by joining the National Guard. The only sex in the Quayle controversy concerns a report that the Indiana senator allegedly and unsuccessfully propositioned a lobbyist-Playboy model in 1980, thin gruel indeed compared with the Hart stew.

What is a Quayle?

A bird that ducks.

Newspaper cartoonists, of course, have had a field day portraying Quayle as a quail, a shy game bird unused to publicity, except perhaps in hunting magazines. But it is television comedians who have really cranked up joke production this week.

David Letterman and Jay Leno weighed in early in the week on NBC’s “Late Night” and “Tonight” shows, respectively. Letterman presented a list of Quayle’s National Guard duties, including making “cool explosion sounds when platoon trains with dummy grenades.” Leno, filling in for Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” claimed that he had seen Quayle, a hawk on national defense, swapping war stories with Pat Robertson, the former Republican presidential candidate and hawk who also was accused of using family influence to avoid combat. Leno also compared the two vice presidential candidates and concluded that Quayle has a couple of pluses over his Democratic counterpart, Lloyd Bentsen--”a blow dryer and a pulse.”

What’s the Quayle special at Kentucky Fried Chicken this week?

A bucket of right wings.

Letterman and Leno, however, served only as warm-up acts for the main event--the return of Carson to “The Tonight Show” on NBC and political satirist Mark Russell’s public television comedy special, broadcast locally on KCET, both on Wednesday night.

What’s the difference between a hawk and a Quayle?

None.

Carson, who had been off the show for a couple of weeks, greeted his audience by saying, “This looks like the kind of group that would buy Dan Quayle a tape of ‘Good Morning, Vietnam.’ ”

The comedian got a lot of mileage out of film footage that showed Quayle taking his garbage out earlier this week.

“They want to show he’s just an average guy,” Carson said. “And he took the garbage right out to the curb, put it in his limo and the chauffeur drove it over to the dump (applause and laughter). I think that’s kind of nice though, Quayle taking the garbage out to the curb, obviously getting ready for his duties as vice president.”

Wealth Was Ammunition

Carson also found ammunition in Quayle’s wealth. “Somebody said he’s worth $200 million and they were shocked that a guy with $200 million didn’t go to Vietnam. The only guy with that much money who went to Vietnam was Bob Hope.”

Carson made much of Quayle meeting his military obligation in his home state of Indiana. Quipped Carson: “. . . Quayle is not going to be helped by that film that comes out about his military career--’Thirty Seconds Over Indianapolis.’ ”

The Republican ticket is the start of a great baseball team--a Yankee and a Dodger.

Meanwhile, Russell, a Washington resident who has made a career of deflating politicians, devoted a generous chunk of his television special to Quayle.

During the roll call at the Republican convention in New Orleans, Russell maintained that Quayle’s home state introduced itself as “Indiana, not one square foot of which fell to the Viet Cong when Dan Quayle was in the National Guard. . . .”

Referring again to Quayle’s Guard service, Russell said, “As a matter of fact, the Indianapolis 500 was the name of his old Army combat outfit. And his defenders insisted, yes, he wasn’t in Vietnam but he saw the movie ‘Platoon’ five times and that’s good enough for me.”

In the same vein, Russell remarked that the GOP ticket consists of “two combat veterans, George Bush, who was shot down in the Pacific (as a Navy pilot in World War II), and Dan Quayle, who was bombed in New Orleans.”

If the Viet Cong attacked Muncie, Dan Quayle was ready.

Away from the television set, Americans are sometimes being force-fed jokes about Quayle.

Steve Rabin, a senior vice president at the Ogilvy & Mather public relations firm in Washington, recalled that earlier this week he involuntarily heard the joke that led this story while he was taking a shower after a workout.

A man, presumably a Vietnam War veteran, in the shower next to him, shouted the joke at him, Rabin said, and then launched into “a tirade” about how he disliked those who are hawks in national politics but not when their own careers are at stake.

Intent on Telling Someone

“He must have felt so enraged he was going to tell it to anybody,” Rabin said.

Robert Neuman, an administrative assistant to Arizona Democratic Rep. Morris (Mo) Udall and an observer of the nation’s political humor streak, said that such incidents reflect an underlying tension in all Quayle-Vietnam jokes.

Because the scandal around Hart involved sex, not the aftereffects of a divisive war, “it was easier to do more ribald jokes,” Neuman said. In the case of Quayle, “because the issue is Vietnam and the National Guard, it’s hard-edged and not as funny,” he said. “There’s a grim side to this.”

How many National Guardsmen does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A hundred. One to put in the light bulb and the rest to keep an eye out for the Viet Cong.

Bob Orben, who has written comedy for 40 years and political speeches for 20, said that the Quayle jokes fit his theory that public figures are defined largely by the jokes people tell about them.

Anyone who comes into the national spotlight will “have a joke inventory built up around him. It may not necessarily be true, but it does reflect the average person’s understanding of that figure,” Orben, who has written jokes for Red Skelton and speeches for former president Gerald Ford, said.

Jokes about Quayle were inevitable even without the Vietnam issue, Orben added. Quayle’s youth, looks and academic record were all natural joke subjects, he explained.

Orben’s own comment on the Quayle affair: “Of course he didn’t go to Canada. With his academic record, maybe he didn’t know where it is.”