Questioned later by reporters, who weren't sure if they got it, Clinton said: "You guys keep telling me, 'Lighten up! Be funny!' I get a little funny and now I'm being psychoanalyzed."

Clinton, hyper-focused wonk that she is, has a personality that has long appeared to be the product of focus groups and advisors from the Professor Henry Higgins Finishing School for Formerly Radical Broads. She has been so ravaged by the media, the public and, it would seem, her own perfectionism that she comes across less as a human being than as a historical figure whose legacy depends on keeping her humanity out of the equation.

It's possible she's right about that. But the fact that we're seeing a black candidate who seems infinitely more relaxed with himself than his female competitor speaks volumes about just how much we're likely to punish women who step outside the bounds of corporate-flavored gravitas.

Part of this is Clinton's own fault — the very act of saying "you keep telling me to be funny" is depressing evidence of her burdensome self-consciousness. But then again, female humor is easily bent into the worst cliches about women. Funny men, after all, are considered smart, confident and sexy. But wisecracking chicks risk accusations of bitterness, hormonal instability and the assumption (no matter what they look like) that they're using wit to compensate for physical unattractiveness.

As a result, a lot of ambitious women have been conditioned not only to tone the comedy down (remember the old dating adage, "Laugh at his jokes, but don't be funnier than him"?) but to resist witty self-deprecation, a genre that some old-school feminists were too tin-eared to interpret as anything other than a sign of low self-esteem. What's left is stridency, earnestness and painstakingly rehearsed jokes ripe for reducing to male-bashing sound bites. The effect: the Cathy comic strip character with a campaign bus. Ouch.

Is Clinton funny deep down? I'm willing to bet she is, only because I doubt she could have survived the last 15 years without either a sense of humor or a serious Quaalude habit. But I'd also bet most of us will never see it, no matter how hard she tries. Even if she learns how to tell a joke, the colluding forces of media savagery, Washington banality and a culture in which female power is not yet entirely compatible with having a real personality will render her something less than human. Will it cost her the nomination? Who knows. But it's already cost her much more than that.