With so much being written about the touchiness of jokes, it’s time for a quick roundup of sacred cows getting ribbed: In the current NY Review of Books, Zadie Smith writes about how Franz Kafka and his friends used to burst out laughing when he read his work out loud; Slate pokes fun at the real way terrorists greet each other (it’s not with fist bumps); the NY Post is indignant that baseball’s golden child got taunted by Canadian seat-warmers; and The Economist evaluates Communist jokes, from the Iron Curtain to present day: “Many of the jokes told about past Soviet leaders are now told about Vladimir Putin (Stalin appears to him in a dream and says: ‘I have two bits of advice for you: kill your opponents and paint the Kremlin blue.’ Putin asks, ‘Why blue?’).” A classic.