Jokes Are Flying After Arrest Of Unabomber Suspect

At last, it is safe to tell Unabomber jokes. Not that I was afraid before. Some columnists may have worried about getting a bomb in the mail if they went after the Unabomber, but not me. It's just that I was, uh . . . I was busy writing other courageous columns.

Here's something funny: In one of the early stories about the Unabomber, it said that the FBI had "combed" his one-room cabin and found a bomb under the bed!

Combed? It's a one-room cabin. How much combing do you have to do? There's a bed, a chair and a desk. Steve and Harry from the FBI walk in, and Steve says, "Harry, I'll look under the chair, you look under the bed." Where else are you gonna start, in the grand foyer? (The guy didn't even have cable! Think how his life would have changed if only he'd been able to watch Larry King.)

Q. What did the lawyer say to the Unabomber?

A. Just remember, you were practicing golf.

Q. Why did the FBI agents have to move in when they did?

A. They'd heard he might publish again.

I must say there was some long faces at The Washington Post when this guy was arrested. The Unabomber had more inches of copy in the Post in 1995 than most of the writers in the Style section. I half expected him to win the Pulitzer Prize. Though what would he do with the cash stipend, build a Florida room?

Oh, good news. Here's an update from last week's column about my dog, Maggie, eating all my money: It turns out there's a branch of the Treasury Department that deals with mutilated money. It told me it will replace the money that Maggie ate, and - get this - it said that since I was a professional journalist and all, it would accept my word for how much money was eaten, without having to scrutinize all the remains. As you know, I said she ate $140. But, um, I have to admit that I rechecked my money clip and have discovered that she actually ate $26,470. Just for the record.

Here's my favorite Unabomber joke. Like some of the ones above, it was created by my friend Bob Somerby, a comedian.

Q. Why did the Unabomber cross the road?

A. Because a bomber is really a chicken.

Even with the sighs of relief that the Unabomber has apparently been caught and his cowardly brand of terrorism has been ended, amazingly, there are some twisted thinkers out there who are already trying to make Theodore Kaczynski into a cult hero - because of his rage against the march of technology and the destruction of the environment. Like Paul Bunyan, a mythology may grow up around him. The next thing you know, there'll be festivals to celebrate the Unabomber's birthday and T-shirts with excerpts from the manifesto.

People will recall the recent newspaper story about how in 1978 Ted Kaczynski's romantic advances to a woman supervisor at the Cushion-Pak foam factory in Lombard, Ill., were rebuffed, and how he took it badly and began making crude remarks about her. Then he began writing crude limericks about her, pasting them up on machinery inside the factory, and he was fired. Supposedly, this sent him on a tailspin from which he never recovered. When Ted Kaczynski becomes a cult hero, surely someone will write a limerick about that.

There once was a real foxy mama,

Who said no when Ted K. tried to glom her.

Ted got all p.o.'d,

Lost his job, hit the road,

Goodbye world, well hello, Unabomber!

(Copyright 1996, Creators Syndicate Inc.)

Syndicated humor columnist Tony Kornheiser, who writes for The Washington Post, appears Sundays in the Scene section.