self-effacing joke

Self-effacing jokes work best when they suggest something that is not true.

Obama sidesteps by making a self-effacing joke about “Groundhog Day” being the last comedy he’s seen.

Mr. Paterson then made a self-effacing joke about his visual impairment; he is the first legally blind governor in the state’s history.

As a fundraiser for a children's charity, he published two best-selling, self-effacing joke books containing jokes the locals often told about him and his teammates.

You could pick out the British by their nervous jerking heads, native air of suspicion, and constant stream of self-effacing jokes.

"Pulling the leg" of the pakeha and self-effacing jokes are superb means of providing social lubrication.

Mr. Colbert: "I'm still waiting for Bush to make a self-effacing joke about executing the retarded."

And the people who were spending their Wednesday evening in the Burlington County College auditorium in Mount Laurel seemed sympathetic, posing polite questions and chuckling nervously at his self-effacing jokes.

His self-effacing joke about literary paternity in the prologue allows him to introduce at once the device of multiple fictive authors and his awareness of multiple readers - the dual substructure of the novel's true ingenio.

And he was a guest on May's season finale, starring in two short skits in which he said, among several self-effacing jokes, that what voters should be looking for in their next president is someone who is "very, very, very old."

He slipped easily from self-effacing jokes, to a gripping case history of a boyfriend who harassed his girlfriend and set her mother's house afire, to tales of his grandfather, a sharecropper who was shot dead by a white landowner in 1930.

Excessively thin and small as a child and young man, Sinatra's skinny frame later became a staple of his own jokes and those of the Rat Pack members during stage shows, one self-effacing joke being: "A little kid, skinny."

"It's amazing what has happened," said Mr. Stine, 50, who sprinkles his conversation with self-effacing jokes about his receding hairline, unathletic physique and modestly furnished apartment, which he shares with his wife, Jane, and their son, Matthew, 15.

On Wednesday, Press Secretary Jay Carney tried to lighten the tone at his briefing with a self-effacing joke and reference to a viral video mocking his frequent use of the phrase "I appreciate the question" for questions he doesn't especially appreciate.

“Sherman is seen by the Democratic leadership as a pesky loner who will only sponsor legislation that looks good back home.”Mr. Sherman, 57, is perpetually accessible at public events in the San Fernando Valley, often handing out combs (a self-effacing joke, since he is bald).

When the news of its success reached the Russian public, it inspired a mix of reactions - excitement, whispered questions about why the Soviets had not made it there first and the kind of self-effacing jokes that are part of the charm of Russian stoicism.