In the wake of the Michael Richards debacle, Laugh Factory owner Jaime Masada has banned the N-word from his comedy club.

"However," he added, "bitch, ho and c*nt are still funny."

A Massachusetts man who allegedly kidnapped a car salesman during a test drive and drove the vehicle more than 1,000 miles was in custody in Wisconsin. He was charged with 'pulling a Kramer.'

SEINFELD BLAMES "VAST PRESBYTERIAN CONSPIRACY" FOR SLOW DVD SALES

POUGHKEEPSIE, New York.  Sales figures for the Christmas shopping season are in, and last-minute purchases pushed total revenues high enough for most retailers to declare 2006 a success, with one exception.  "I'm sitting on twenty cases of Seinfeld Season 7 DVD's," says Will Hutchins, a sales manager at Best Buy.  "I'm going to have to mark them down with the 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Saves Kwanzaa' tapes."

Seinfeld boxed set.

Boxed sets of episodes from the popular show have been quick sellers at holiday time over the past few years, but for some reason the last installment in the series never took off.  Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian who is named after the show, thinks he knows why.  "It's the Presbyterians--they control retail spending in America!" he snapped as he got into his car outside a Hollywood restaurant last night.  Presbyterians are the only American demographic group that prefers to pay retail.

Presbyterian church

Experts in the sociology of American religious groups were surprised by the charge.  "That's a new one on me," said the Rev. Andrew Greeley of the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago.  "Usually when people come up with bogus conspiracy theories they blame Catholics and Jews, and to a lesser extent Rastafarians."

"The Jews may control the media, but we control the ganja!"

The charge is particularly galling to leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA), who have struggled over the years to combat stereotypes about members of their faith, many of whom are descendents of notoriously humorless Scottish ancestors.  "What the rest of America needs to understand is that haggis," the traditional Scotch meal consisting of the heart, lungs and liver of a sheep cooked along with onions and oatmeal in the animal's stomach, "is our little joke," says the Rev. Thomas Baird.  "We don't really like the stuff--we've been pulling people's legs with that one for a long time."

Haggis:  As bad as it looks.

Scotch Presbyterians were the last American ethnic group to develop a sense of irony, in much the same way that Egyptians never incorporated perspective into their two-dimensional visual arts.  The first sarcastic remark by an American of Scottish descent was recorded in Buffalo, New York, in 1965 when Thomas "Buzz" McKinnon wore a pair of lime-green pants to a cocktail party after Labor Day.  "Nice pants," remarked Edward "Frosty" Craig drily, and the walls came tumbling down.

"Oh-my-God!  Look at those pants!"

"It was like an early Lenny Bruce routine, or George Carlin's 'Seven Words You Can't Say on TV' bit," says Errol Manning, an assistant professor of American Studies at SUNY-Binghampton.  "All of a sudden all hell broke loose, with women making catty remarks about each other's cable-knit cardigan sweaters.  The party didn't break up until 10:30."

Bruce:  "You know what Presbyterian foreplay is?  Six weeks of begging."

Some industry sources said they blamed Michael Richards' racist outburst at a Los Angeles comedy club for sluggish sales, but others said the effect of the bad publicity that followed the incident was probably neutral.  "A well-timed racial slur can increase sales in previously untapped markets," said Entertainment Industry Daily reporter Charles Best.  "Most American Nazis were holding off until '07 when they release the DVD of 'Borat'," the pseudo-documentary with anti-Semitic dialogue.

Hope:  "What did you have for lunch?  A colony of ants?"

Individual Presbyterians say they have nothing against the Seinfeld show, but are slowly making their way through "The Best of Bob Hope" boxed sets of VHS tapes they have received in the past before they move on to the hip humor of "Seinfeld".  "I'm stuck on tape 1, where his wife asks him where he wants to be buried, and he says 'Surprise me,'" said William Carnegie, a retired life insurance executive.  "I don't get that one."

Copyright 2006, Con Chapman

An Illinois man has admitted banking more than $470,000 in paychecks from a New Jersey company he never worked for. Cosmo Kramer is expected to be sent back to New York where he will enter a not guilty plea.