I really look forward to your columns," a reader said. "The funny ones, that is."

I was crushed.

As an eagle-eyed journalist, I try to provide you with commentaries about the most meaningful things that go on around us, especially at times like this, with grim death gargling from every corner.

School vouchers, pros and cons? Global warming, true or false? The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming?

But, no, you want to hear the one about Lassie.

"Mom, mom, it's Lassie."

"What is it, Timmy?"

"Lassie ate the cantaloupes."

"Oh, no. Is she sick?

"No, but she's a little melancholy."

I was all set to write about health care. But, no.

What do you call a camel without any humps? Humphrey. Get it?

My perspicacious insights are being dismissed, and it makes me feel like Marilyn Monroe.

I'll never forget my grandfather's last words. "Quit shaking the ladder, you little creep."

One man's or woman's idea of humor is not another man's or woman's idea of humor.

If we both wrote down a list of our favorite comedies and a list of our favorite comedians, chances are there would be very few duplications

Have you ever heard of the Algonquin Round Table? Dorothy Parker? Robert Benchley? George F. Kaufman?

I am steeped in Ogden Nash. Not "M*A*S*H.

Steven Wright is all right with me. "I went fishing with Salvador Dali last year. He used a dotted line. He caught every other fish."

Jerry Seinfeld? No. Jonathan Winters? Yes.

Winters plays brothers in the film version of Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One" - "the motion picture with something to offend everyone."

Evelyn Waugh, a man, was briefly married to a woman named Evelyn. Evelyn Gardner.

"The Loved One" is called a "black comedy." It came and went in 1965, but it is seen as something of a prize since then.

I admit that I laughed, and I rarely laugh.

Outside of what I call "side effects" commercials, there isn't a single thing on television that amuses me. A side effects commercial consists of a medicine that might cure something, like "Elvis leg," but at the risk of about 100 possible side effects, that are far worse than Elvis leg.

The side effects are often things I have never heard, that require medicines of their own, which have side effects too, so what started out as Elvis leg holds the potential of every imaginable and unimaginable ailment, affliction, infection, and malady.

These commercials have me in stitches. (Rim shot).

A dung beetle walks into a bar and says, "Is this stool taken?"

Julius Caesar walks into a bar, holds up two fingers and says, "Five beers please."

Is that what you want? It's beneath me. It's under me. I think you are trying to preposition me.

What kind of a game do you play with a wombat? Wom.

But all seriousness aside. Do you want to hear about this new tax on sugary drinks or not?

Someone threw a bottle of Dr Pepper at my head. Fortunately, it was a soft drink.

Two cows are standing in a field and one cow says to the other cow, "Have you heard about that mad cow disease?"

And the other cow says, "Good thing we are penguins."

Craig Marshall Smith is an artist, author, educator and Highlands Ranch resident. His latest book "Four Thousand Holes," a compilation of published and unpublished columns and other commentaries, is now available through Amazon Prime and Barnes & Noble. He can be reached at craigmarshallsmith@comcast.net.