Dear President Obama, I heard that you are bailing people out. People want you to stop foreclosures, and you bail them out. People talk to you about losing their jobs, and you bail them out and find them new jobs foreclosing homes.

Someone brought you a leaky boat, and you bailed it out and also created many loaves of bread and fish. Or possibly that was someone else; with all the newspapers going out of business, it's hard to follow the news.

So, a horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Why the long face?"

Anyway, my point is that you are currently Barack the Bail-Out Baron. In spite of the huge national debt that we face, you're spending another few hundred billion dollars to create a stimulus package to do more bailing out than Lindsay Lohan's lawyer. And after giving millions of dollars to bail out companies like AIG (America's Income Grabber), you went on TV last night and suggested maybe we've made a mistake, and our bailout resources aren't being spent in the best possible manner.

I agree with you, Mr. Obama. There's another place that a bailout is needed, desperately, in these troubled times. And I think you realize it. Because, rather that staying with the serious political pundits, you decided to sit down last night with Jay Leno -- a joke-teller. While America's oil and money reserves may have dwindled somewhat, nobody is focusing on the real problem: Our joke reserves are depleted, and the joke has all but gone bankrupt.

So,

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how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? (One, but the light bulb has to want to change.)

Fifty years ago, America's joke reserves were overflowing. Countless books were written, filled with nothing but jokes, and people would read these jokes and then tell them among friends. Whether at the water cooler, at a backyard barbecue, or whatever else people did before the Internet, America's joke production was second to none. People told jokes to each other every day, and it was an expected part of social discourse.

Sadly, times have changed. New technology has created faster ways for jokes to travel. The Internet allowed the forwarding of jokes at speeds never before imagined, allowing jokes to travel across the country in minutes that normally would have taken dozens and dozens of barbeques. We were so used to having a joke surplus, we thought nothing of burning through our jokes like they were water -- or at least really flammable water, like in the Cuyahoga River.

So, a grasshopper walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Hey, we've got a drink named after you!" And the grasshopper says, "You've got a drink named Jim?"

Well, as you know, America's joke reserves are now severely depleted. We sent all our jokes over the Internet at instant speed, and even when the strategic joke reserve was opened, it was immediately linked by everyone and the jokes were used up. Twenty years ago, if you went to a party, you could rely on people to tell a few jokes. Today, it is a rarity to hear jokes out in the wild. And this is a shame, because in these tough economic times, we need jokes being told almost as much as we need money.

So, did you hear about the toilet-theft crime wave in Chicago? The police have nothing to go on.

And so, Mr. President, I call upon you to lead the nation toward joke telling once again. If we run out of money, we can always print more, but when we run out of jokes, it's no laughing matter.

Seth Brown is an award-winning humor writer, the creator of GodToVerse.com, and always enjoys a good joke. If you've got one, please send it along. It's obvious he needs it. His column appears weekly in the Transcript and weakly on his Web site, www.RisingPun.com.