IUCOUNU (known across Almery as 'the Laughing Magician') had worked one of his most mordant jokes upon Cugel.

He spoke of Berlin's parallel societies (East/West, Russian/Israeli) and cracked mordant Jewish jokes.

Biting Jokes and Ballads Over the years, in fact, the peculiar disposition of his remains has been celebrated in many a mordant joke or tale, recounted by ordinary folk who still regard "the general from Sonora" as perhaps the toughest and most valiant of revolutionary heroes.

While it may have been a mordant joke for New Yorker readers, for Ms. Semel it defines, in a fundamental way, the parameters of her life.

Because Hamlet himself is a wit and a maker of ironies, Shakespeare often uses him to point up these contrasts verbally and so intensify them, just as his mordant jokes heighten the atmosphere of gloom rather than dispelling it.

He presented a cup to Ben, and then, as if in response to an unuttered, mordant joke, he asked, "How will it be for me, Smee-tee-san?

He did, though, have a store of mordant jokes.

One of his buddies makes this into a mordant historical joke: Hitler was so upset when he heard that a Jew had jumped on his favorite hat, that he shot himself.

But for years, the indicting grand jury has been criticized as automatic - the 1990 legislative hearings were spurred in part by a mordant joke by former Chief Judge Sol Wachtler, who said that if a prosecutor asked, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.

It carried the name Buconero, or Black Hole, which has become something of a mordant joke.