To the Editor:

Re “Welcome to the Age of the Unfunny Joke,” by Lee Siegel (Sunday Review, Sept. 20):

Since I spent the better part of 20 years writing for Jim Henson’s Muppets, I feel that I can speak with some authority on jokes.

The unfunny joke sounds to me like a twist on the cheap laugh.

Comedians who take comedy seriously know what a cheap laugh is. The best example is a nightclub comic doing bad blue material. Women will laugh nervously at it. But it’s a cheap laugh because the comic didn’t earn it. Shock-jock material is just another version of that: making people uncomfortable.

There is no such thing as an unfunny joke. There are bad jokes. (We had a rule on “The Muppet Show” that a joke too bad to use once might just be bad enough to use three times.) Besides being an oxymoron, unfunny jokes are just a euphemism for bad material. (You really didn’t want them to laugh there?)

What’s next? Unsung songs? Unpainted oils? Unwritten plays? (I’ve got a trunk full of those.)

If you want to make politically correct statements about politics, world poverty, women’s rights and so on, you’re a politician, or a college professor, or a political commentator, or a crusader. But if you’re not earning honest laughs, you’re not a comedian.