A funny thing happened to me a couple weeks ago.

While playing second base in a co-ed softball game, I attempted to field a hard ground ball hit up the middle. At the last second, the ball took an unexpected hop and landed at the top of my nose, right between my eyes. The result was a broken nose, a lot of blood and my first ever emergency trip to the Mary Greeley Medical Center.

Did I cry? Heck, no. As Tom Hanks put it so astutely in “A League of Their Own,” “There’s no crying in baseball.”

What followed was one of the most humorous evenings of my life.

Realizing that I’d want more to remember the evening by than just a bloody T-shirt, I called a friend, demanding he bring a digital camera to the emergency room. I posed for pictures, made everyone guess the number of stitches and entertained guests with a green clothespin on my nose. Upon my 1 a.m. return to the dorms, I re-enacted my whole adventure for everyone who was awake and for everyone who was awakened by my laughter.

Whether it has been a bad date, a car accident or an entire season of Kansas City Royals baseball, I have always been able to turn the most dreary occurrences into fodder for self-deprecating humor.

Indeed, self-deprecating humor is also one of the staples of modern American politics. In the age of political correctness, a joke of this type avoids the pitfalls of most jokes — offending a constituency by singling out a particular group; the only one disparaged is the teller himself.

The ability to laugh at one’s follies demonstrates a desirable degree of humility, and the willingness to disclose one’s mistakes is a sign of openness. Both are rare qualities in a line of work crowded with braggarts and egoists.

In my own wholly unscientific and unashamedly subjective study of past presidential elections, I have discovered one simple pattern has held for all national campaigns in the last 30 years: The funnier candidate has always won.

George W. Bush — the only president to have nearly invoked section three of the 25th Amendment by choking on a pretzel — soundly beat Sen. John Kerry and narrowly edged out the esteemed inventor of the Internet, Vice President Al Gore.

Bill Clinton easily out-humored the elder Bush and Sen. Bob Dole, who, unfortunately for the Republican Party, did not discover comedy until his post-election Pepsi commercial spoofing Viagra.

Bush, 41, did manage to beat humorless Dukakis; and his predecessor, the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, easily flexed his comedic muscles against Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter.

In Carter’s first presidential bid, he faced easier competition from former President Gerald Ford, who along with being the only unelected president in U.S. history, also holds the dubious honor of being the one least able to crack a joke.

It is easy to see why humor is essential to a campaign — it spins supposed shortcomings into strengths. Nixon turned a potentially career-ending scandal into a political triumph when he admitted to receiving gifts from a political ally — a little dog named Checkers, which he refused to return.

When asked whether age would be a factor in the campaign, 73-year-old Reagan promised not to exploit his opponent’s “youth and inexperience.”

And who didn’t smile when Bush responded to John Kerry’s indignant accusation that he owned a lumber company with “I own a timber company? News to me! Need some wood?”

The undeniable pattern of the American people choosing to elect Comedians-in-chief will have important consequences in the next election.

Many of those considered likely to run in 2008, including Iowa’s own Tom Vilsack and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, are seriously lacking in comedic skills.

Women are inclined to be joke-receivers and not joke-tellers, but Sen. Clinton, with so much to be self-deprecating about, could yet break through this glass ceiling.

If all else fails, Gov. Schwarzenegger is only one small constitutional change away from running.