"All the profits from tonight are going to a good cause," announced
 comedian Mickey Freeman, as the crowd hushed to hear which charity would
 benefit from Soupy Sales's book party at the Friar's Club last week.

"A good cause!" Freeman continued. "Soupy wants to refinish his
 basement!"

Oy. Well, at least SOMEONE is following Mayor Giuliani's request that we
 all get back to normal.

The date was Oct. 11 -- one month exactly since the day when all jokes
 became stale. With that cloud of sadness still hovering over the entire
 city, the legends of the Friar's Club set out to celebrate comedian
 Soupy Sales's autobiography "Soupy Sez: My Life and Zany Times." (The
 book is in its third printing already. Apparently, the first two were
 blurry.)

The Milton Berle Room at the famed E. 55th Street clubhouse was filled
 with all the usual suspects -- "Chuck Wepner is here! Larry Storch is
 here! Charlie Callas is here! They say that beauty is skin deep, but
 UGLY is Charlie Callas!" Freeman said -- the cocktail franks and the
 cheap red wine were being downed in the usual quantities, the stolen
 jokes were being re-swapped with the usual excuses, and Freeman tried to
 hold everyone's attention with the usual old jokes ("Books are
 important. I knew a guy who hated doctors, so he treated himself from a
 medical encyclopedia. The other day, he died of a misprint! So you can
 see how books are important!").

But the mood was off. You could tell it from the minute that Nipsey
 Russell entered the room. Freeman asked him to come to the microphone
 and blow the dust off some jokes for a few minutes (a quintessential
 requirement of Friar's membership), yet Russell declined.

"It's an awkward time to be a comedian," Russell told me. "Comedy is
 based partly on mean-spiritedness. It's hard to do that now."

But just as a salmon must swim upstream, a comedian must work. Russell
 said that since Sept. 11, he's had to adopt a new approach to all his
 old jokes.

"You have to fudge everything," he said. "I'll say, `You know, before all
 this happened, we used to think a lot of things were important. We'd ask
 President Clinton, "Did  you sleep with Gennifer Flowers?" and he'd say,
 "Not a wink." But that's not important now.'

"You can still get a laugh, but you have to put the joke in a different
 context now," Russell explained.

Freeman, naturally, hasn't stopped working (the only thing that could get
 him to stop would be a fire in that joke vault that he's constantly
 raiding). Just a week after the attack, Freeman played a Jewish temple
 in Houston (talk about a tough room!) and opened by explaining the
 importance of working through adversity.

"I'm used to working under tough conditions," Freeman said. "I finished a
 show at a hospital the other day and I saw a guy in a wheelchair in the
 front row, so I said, `I hope you get better.' He just looked at me and
 said, `I hope you do, too.' So you can see I'm used to working under
 tough conditions."

With the jibes at a minimum -- and the Friar's motto "Prae Omnia
 Fraternitas ("Beyond All Things Brotherhood") actually being observed
 for the first time -- the talk turned to Soupy Sales, who's experiencing
 a renaissance right now, what with a book, two movies and a new live
 show. There was actually love in the room. A room full of old comedians
 and not a bad word was spoken. Something IS wrong in this town.

Russell maneuvered in for a word with Sales, who was signing books.
 "Soupy," he asked, "have you seen my show?"

Sales took the bait. "On and off," he said.

"And how did you like it?"

"Off."

Meanwhile, the evening was winding down, so Freeman finally offered what
 he called his "Afghanistan joke," which was really just an introduction
 for a fellow comedian, a guy who is always trying to find work in the
 Catskills -- what the Jewish comics call "the mountains."

"He's so eager for a gig," Freeman said, "that when he heard that
 Afghanistan was full of mountains, he said, `Send me! I'll go!'"

Let the record show, the joke bombed.

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