Under the Sheets.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Impeachment trial - Brief Article

When I was a young girl in upstate New York, my best friend's mom was my comic mom. My own mother was very funny, with a mordant Irish Catholic wit, but with five kids, she didn't have a lot of time to joke around. My best friend's dad was a thoracic surgeon, so although there were four kids in her family, her mom had help, leisure time, and disposable income.

We listened to her comedy albums: Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Richard Pryor, Moms Mabley. She got the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue before anyone on our block and would do dramatic readings of lingerie descriptions. She would call our house and say, "Channel Four, right now," and hang up, and I would turn on the television, and there would be Bette Midler doing her Merv Griffin routine for the first time.

I had been watching Impeachment Kabuki Theater, like some bizarre Internet chat room come to life. People were wandering in and out, responding to statements made hours before, taking no responsibility for anything they said. Henry "Human Life Amendment" Hyde was our chat room host, treating John Conyers from Michigan, seated on his left, as if it were his job to get him snacks.

So I decided to give my old friend a call. She's almost eighty now and has a few health problems. Before I could get a word in, she told me she thinks she has Alzheimer's because she'd just written a check to "Blue Cross, Blue Cheese."

I told her I was the designated watcher of The Taliban Lite Show among my more fully employed friends and the only way I could stand it was by combining my watching with working out on the second-hand Stairmaster in my bedroom. She said, "You must be halfway up Mt. Washington by now."

She told me that when she was a teen in her little farm town in upstate New York, she and her gal pals savored a very racy joke. Whenever some authority figure would make a pronouncement, they would finish it with a side-mouthed "under the sheets" and crack themselves up. She said that she found herself yelling her old punch line at the TV during the hearings and it had...