Last modified: Monday, July 23, 2007 11:51 PM EDT REILLY: Lighten up, folks Today, I would like to address our serious national deficit. No, not the one in Treasury Department (which, at last count, was approximately eighteen gazillion dollars - in other words, your total worth times a gazillion). Heck, that's something our children have to worry about. It will be a nice change for them after spending their adolescence worrying about their hair and shoes. No, I am talking about our national humor deficit. Once, American humor was of world class quality. Even during the darkest days of the Cold War, we could take comfort in the fact that the Russians had nothing to match Milton Berle. (Oh, sure, the Kremlin tried putting Nikita Khrushchev in a dress. Not even the Albanians would laugh at him.) But somewhere along the line, we seem to have lost our national sense of humor. For example, last week President Bush underwent a colonoscopy. Now, this was the subject of much juvenile banter on a number of Web sites. ("Any luck finding those weapons of mass destruction, Mr. President?") But the reaction was almost immediate. Other readers wrote in, declaring that there was nothing funny about cancer and nothing funny about cancer tests. Certainly there is nothing funny about a disease. But nobody is joking about having a disease. They are joking about the leader of the free world being placed in a position that is, well, not exactly what you picture as presidential. At least not when you look at Mount Rushmore. And, in all candor, having a colonoscopy is not funny. Somebody ELSE having a colonoscopy, now that's funny. (In retrospect, even one's own can be a source of humor. I recall waking up, still fairly buzzed from the sedation, looking at the screen and thinking, "Gee, this is just like that Discovery Channel documentary on the sewers of Paris.") Closer to home, Sun Chronicle columnist and staff writer Rebecca Keister was recently taken to task on the paper's letters to the editor page after a column she wrote about how she enjoyed being self-indulgent from time to time. The letter writer accused her of being - self-indulgent. OK, let me try to explain, in technical journalism terms, what Ms. Keister's column was: IT WAS A JOKE. Of course, no one ever misses the joke in my columns. Except for my children, who seemed to have skipped the humor gene. And a few other people. For example, recently I took what I thought was a light-hearted look at a controversy over a reform math program in New Jersey. (Key humor point: Anonymous letters warned the superintendent to get out of town.) I got e-mails, some several pages long, accusing me of, yes, treating the subject lightly. In conclusion, we have to do something to stem the dangerous humor drain that is posing a threat to our national ability to lighten up. Otherwise, we are going to find ourselves dependent on imported humor and our children will be laughing at Borat. I don't think that's funny. TOM REILLY is a Sun Chronicle news editor. No, seriously. He can be reached at 508-236-0332 or at treilly@thesunchronicle.com