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PARIS - Humour in France is often a pretty straightforward, rather ponderous affair and anyone brought up on Anglo-Saxon banter soon learns to stow it because, frankly, the French don't understand it.
If a workmate arrives at the office soaking wet, nursing a sprained ankle because she's slipped on a dog turd (a feared hazard in Paris streets) and carrying a shopping bag with six broken eggs, you do not say, "Looks like you've had a great day."
You would get a confused or blank look. Eventually, you may suspect that, in the French lexicon, irony is something that happens to wrinkled clothes.
But the country's long-running presidential election campaign has brought an unexpected flowering of dry, barbed and occasionally warped humour, delivered mainly by the internet generation.
There can hardly be an email box in France that has not received a bogus official portrait of Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative frontrunner in Sunday's runoff vote, as head of state.
Sarkozy is seen in front of the Elysee Palace, but all that can be seen is the top of his head - someone has clearly forgotten to give the vertically challenged candidate an orange box to stand on.
With his diminutive stature, tough law-and-order stance and ambition, Sarkozy is the satirists' target of choice.
Bogus rap songs going the rounds, such as Sarko Funky Fresh, Amoureux de la Police," (In Love With the Police) and In Da Rotary Club pour scorn on his search for the youth vote.
There is also a pastiche of Sarkozy's ubiquitous election poster that is so close to the original you at first hardly realise the words have been changed.
Instead of Sarkozy's sonorous beliefs in national unity, prosperity and solidarity, there's a long list of his supposed pet hates, including immigrants, lefties "and the guy who's been screwing my wife", a reference to the former Interior Minister's reported marital troubles.
Sarkozy's rival, the Socialist Segolene Royal, gets off far more lightly, possibly because her school-marm character is left-wing and less divisive.
The election has been a boon for Les Guignols, a TV political satire show with puppets, the venerable weekly Le Canard Enchaine and the hard-nosed political magazine Marianne.
The Guignols' Sarko puppet seethes with impatience and repressed rage, while Sego is dressed as the national emblem, Marianne. She is almost impossible to spot because she is swathed in a forest of tricolours - an artful attack on her campaign strategy of draping herself with patriotism.
The far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen is portrayed as a monster (think Jabba the Hutt in a suit), and President Jacques Chirac is skewered as amiable but corrupt and his wife, Bernadette, as matronly.
To a hilarious punk song, The Only Thing That Would Make Me Happy Would Be To See Chirac In Prison, the Guignols' Chirac is hauled off to court to face charges of financial sleaze arising from his controversial past after he leaves office and loses presidential immunity. While Chirac pleads his case, the bouffant Bernadette looks on in regal disapproval.
On April 22, the first round of balloting, Les Guignols' "election-night special" picked up 2.4 million viewers, or roughly 10 per cent of the national audience. Sales of Le Canard Enchaine have surged, and a Marianne issue on "the real Sarkozy" had to be reprinted three times. Their success is a telling illustration of the public's thirst for a view of the election that has not been polished by spindoctors and delivered by a compliant news media.
A cartoon in Le Canard, for instance, shows Sarkozy and Segolene as they prepare behind the scenes for Thursday's all-important live TV debate.
Sarkozy's minder is a nurse, who has put him in a straitjacket and administered tranquillisers to make him look happy and in control of his rage.
Royal's minder is her partner, Francois Hollande, who is loosening her up with some booze and desperately coaching her with a joke book, ready for the camera.
A special place in irony's roll of honour should go to a video clip (see it here) that parodies the fawning treatment mainstream French media give to politicians.
It is a futuristic TV news item in which Sarkozy, "the little father of the nation", dies at 87 after being in power for more than three decades.
The "official paparazzi" from Paris-Match (a celebrity magazine which is especially kind to the country's politicians) are already hard at work, taking photos of the grieving crowd.
