Funny people, people who appreciate funny people, people who wonder how funny people got so funny — check out my colleague Jeff Nussbaum’s review of “And Here’s the Kicker” in today’s Washington Post.

A preview:

“When Al Gore was vice president and saw on his schedule that he would have to speak at an event that required humor, he would announce, with mock solemnity, that it was time to assemble the humor cabinet. This proclamation might well have been delivered by shofar, given that in practice it served as a call for most of the Jews on the staff. Perhaps the circumstances of my birth did qualify me to write jokes, although I think the vice president was more taken with the fact that my dad’s family had actually run a hotel in the Catskills — the real, live Borscht Belt.

Either way, I ended up writing jokes for the vice president and others. I’ve found myself in the awkward situation of telling a former senator that the word “feces” is funnier than any of the synonyms he’s considering. Or that a roomful of male septuagenarians will get the punch line “If it lasts longer than four hours, consult a physician.”

But when asked why, I always wished I had a better answer than “Because it’s funny.” Someone, I thought, should assemble a compendium of insights and techniques from actual humor writers.

That’s exactly what Mike Sacks did in putting together “And Here’s The Kicker.” Even if you weren’t looking for a comedy desk reference, it’s worth picking up the book just to find out which “Deep Thought” Jack Handey is most proud of writing.

But “And Here’s the Kicker” qualifies as a book only because the interviews have been put on paper and bound between two covers. What the reader experiences is a series of interviews conducted by a sort of hybrid between James Lipton and Dick Cavett: The questions are so hyper-informed that they’re fawning, but they’re just loose enough to be funny.”