enjoy the jokes? What do you think? Where do you stand on that?

My take is I can't help it. I feel like it's beyond my control. If something's funny, I laugh at it. And I don't know how many of you have the same feeling, but the thing that makes these jokes make you laugh is that they're so deeply inappropriate. Am I right? If they were not deeply inappropriate, would they really be funny? No.

So in many ways I'm giving you an out, right? So somebody accuses you of laughing at these jokes, here's your out. They're funny because they're inappropriate. It's true, right? It's the inappropriateness, the fact that it's a tragedy. That's why you're laughing. If it were not deeply inappropriate, you wouldn't have two things in sort of atom balance, which is what triggers the reflex to laugh.

So I'm going to give you permission to enjoy this, but maybe not right in front of the victims or their families, okay? I hope they're staying off the internet today.

But Wendy Rogers, who's an Arizona state senator, had the tweet of the day in my opinion. Now what I like about this tweet is it's coming from somebody who's not a professional humorist who somehow crafted a perfect joke. Okay, so a non-professional, Wendy Rogers, somehow crafted a perfect tweet. You want to hear it? Of course you do.

Here's her tweet: "Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Alec Baldwin go hunting. How does that play out?" Come on, that's pretty clever. That's pretty funny.

Now here's what I liked about it. The ending, "How does that play out?" is perfect just in terms of joke construction. Because—and this is basically where hypnosis and humor overlap—what is beautiful about this punchline is the question "How does that play out?" allows you to imagine your funniest version. That's a hypnosis trick. Now I doubt she's studied hypnosis, but leaving stuff out so that the audience can fill in the joke is really good form.

Now I don't know if she's just really good at this, Wendy Rogers, or if she just hit one out of the park, lucky swing. But this is a perfect joke. I looked at this. I read this like five times. I was like, God, there's not one wasted word in that sentence. There's nothing you could change in that that would make that better.

Anyway, so we've got some runaway inflation, it looks like. Or do we? Does anybody understand how inflation works? Is anybody old enough here—and I know some of you are—do you remember stagflation? Remember in the Jimmy Carter years we had stagflation, and then all the experts said, "Whoa, now we know what stagflation is, and we know what conditions will cause it in the future." And then those conditions happened again in the future, and what happened? No stagflation.

So we don't even know what caused it, apparently. Well, I mean, I don't, because we were pretty sure that it was going to happen again, and then it just didn't. Now of course there are lots of variables in play, so you have to have all the other things lined up to get the same result, and we didn't.

Now how good are we at predicting economic stuff? Not really good. Are we? That doesn't mean it's not a problem. What it does mean is I can't tell right now. And I remind you too often I have a degree in economics. I don't know if we're in trouble or not, and I'm not sure I woul