“It always comes back to Lehman Brothers.”

If a joke is told and nobody gets it, it’s not the audience’s fault. I now realize that no sane reader would understand that line the way I meant it. Last fall - as the economic meltdown began - CNBC spent a lot of time retracing the causes. For about two months the consensus opinion was that all of our economic woes were caused by the US allowing Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt. (Now the consensus is that Lehman was the straw that broke the camel’s back… but the camel was going down, regardless.)

So when I wrote “It always comes back to Lehman Brothers” that would have been funny to the zero readers of this blog who are also CNBC junkies.

Yep, anytime you have to explain a joke it takes on a whole new dimension of lame.