Congress is a joke. But the joke isn’t funny — unless, of course, you’re into dark humor.

The entire legislative body has been consumed by kvetching, at the expense of actual legislating. And the numbers that highlight this reality are simply atrocious.

According to a Pew Research Center report issued Thursday:

“As of Wednesday the current Congress had enacted 142 laws, the fewest of any Congress in the past two decades over an equivalent time span. And only 108 of those enactments were substantive pieces of legislation, under our deliberately broad criteria (no post-office renamings, anniversary commemorations or other purely ceremonial laws).”

President Obama has felt it necessary to veto only two bills since becoming president. That is fewer than any president since James Garfield in 1881, who vetoed none. But Garfield’s term lasted only 200 days before his death, and he was struck more than two months earlier by an assassin’s bullets.

Part of the reason for the dearth of vetoes is the dearth of legislation making it to the president’s desk. And this is in part because of the ever-shrinking periods of time that Congress is in session.