A professor once asked his audience of captive graduate students, “Is there any room for humor in history?” The question came after relaying a story about a scrambled audio tape, a phrase mistaken for a vulgarity, and the high probability of the translator – seeing as it was Lyndon Baines Johnson they were listening to – correctly identifying the garbled passage as a curse. The joke about this, however, appeared only in the footnotes. There does seem to be some room for humor in history – at least when it comes to the idiosyncrasies of presidents, that is. How many Read more