I am not actually trying to pick on Mitt Romney here.

But this story about his bizarre dog-on-the-roof incident is hilarious precisely because it goes so far out of its way not to be funny. Take, for instance, this graf:

Romney placed his family dog, an Irish setter named Seamus, into a kennel lashed to the top of his station wagon for a 12-hour family trip from Boston to Ontario in 1983. Despite being shielded by a wind screen the former Massachusetts governor erected, Seamus expressed his discomfort with a diarrhea attack.

It's hysterical because it tries to talk about something that would normally be funny as if it were not. The description of the poor dog "express[ing] his discomfort with a diarrhea attack" from the roof of the car, and in apparent dismissal of the future governor's ad hoc windscreen, tries to make something ridiculous and bizarre sound like something completely commonplace, even though both the readers and the writer of the article know it is not. I mean, when I was a kid, we had a dog who pooped on the floor of the vet's office whenever she had to go to the vet's, but she wasn't doing it from the roof of the car.

I'm just sayin', is all, here.