America seems to be losing its sense of humor. It's not just that people can't take a joke anymore. (They never could.) They also can't seem to figure out when the jokes are jokes.

Take the case of Doris Kearns Goodwin. Earlier this year, as the brouhaha about her unacknowledged borrowings raged, the Sunday New York Times published a short and funny spoof article about Goodwin in the Week In Review section. The Times piece facetiously alleged that in her memoir about a lifetime of loving baseball she had claimed that her father had transformed his cornfield into a baseball diamond, and that she had delivered Lou Gehrig's famous speech from the field in Yankees Stadium.

Those were jokes. But the Times had to publish a clarification because so many readers thought the article was a real news story.

Then a few weeks ago, the Beijing Evening News, a Chinese government-run daily with a circulation of a million, ran a story reporting that members of Congress want a new Capitol building with a retractable dome and luxury skyboxes, and that they were threatening to move the Capitol out of Washington to Tennessee or North Carolina if they didn't get it. That story was lifted from The Onion.

At first the Chinese refused even to admit they'd been duped. ''How do you know whether or not we checked the source before we published the story?'' The paper's international editor snapped to a Boston Globe reporter. ''How can you prove it's not correct?''

But apparatchiks are just as humorless and defensive in Denton County, Texas. Maybe more so.
Now winding its way through the Texas courts is a case involving a spoof published in The Dallas Observer, an alternative weekly, about a rural district attorney and judge prosecuting a first-grade child for writing a book report on Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

That same prosecutor and judge really had sentenced a real seventh grader to jail -- in a town called Ponder -- for writing a gothic Halloween story that included scenes of drugs and violence. The satirical Observer piece about the fictional six-year-old has the judge saying, ''Any implication of violence, even in a first-grader's book report, is reason enough for panic and overreaction.'' And the district attorney says, ''We've considered having her certified to stand trial as an adult, but even in Texas there are some limits.''

The district attorney and judge have sued for libel. The legal question is whether an average reader could tell whether or not the story was a piece of fiction.

But even in the world's most semiotically sophisticated, irony-attuned precincts, people just aren't getting the joke these days. On April Fool's eve, the London company that owns Harrods sent out a spoof news release about a non-existent stock offering. The Wall Street Journal, missing the joke, published the report as real news, then ran a correction, and then ran a joshing item declaring that if Harrods ever does go public, "investors would be wise to question its every disclosure." Harrods is suing the Wall Street Journal for suggesting the company is untruthful.

Back during the 1980s and 90s, more and more people were taking less and less seriously. Irony was the new lingua franca. What I take from these recent episodes is not proof that the irony epidemic is over. Rather, irony is now so deeply entrenched that deadpan joking easily passes for the real thing at this over-the-top moment where the factual can be just as preposterous as the fictional. The joking reflex has become, of all things, too subtle for the unsubtle age in which we live.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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