Hee-hee? Heh-heh?

Rib-Ticklin' at the Times.

            Can you laugh visibly in the New York Times? You can (not to say you have to) if you are Gail Collins or Bret Stevens, in their recurrent op-ed-page feature, "The Conversation."

            What do I mean by “to laugh visibly”? I mean "to go Hehe." Or "Hehehe."

            Back in July of 2017, the Times ran a piece titled "Laugh and the World Laughs With You. Type 'Ha,' Not So Much," which sorted out the matter of online laughter pretty thoroughly. (Susan Larson had done the same in the New Yorker --"HAHAHA VS. HEHEHE"-- two years earlier.) But the first actual employment of a laughter meme in the text of a Times feature was in January 29, 2019. Gail and Bret were going back and forth about whether then-President Trump could survive that week’s "shutdown showdown" defeat (ah, nostalgia!) at the hands of Nancy Pelosi: