I bet this monkey would have been funny

If he hadn't been mauled to death by a trio of bears at a Dutch zoo, that is. OK, so that's not the actual monkey that was eaten. What do you expect, The New York Times?

In any case, this is certainly the worst crisis to hit Monkeys Are Always Funny headquarters since the nearly simultaneous 1996 release of the films Dunston Checks In and Ed, a couple of monkey-driven alleged comedies that produced nary a laugh between them. Of course, we got around that one by pointing out that those movies starred Jason Alexander and Matt LeBlanc, respectively, and that not even the most transcendentally funny monkey performance could overcome that kind of baggage.

So what happened at that Dutch zoo? Well, here's what someone at the zoo said in a statement: "In an area where Sloth bears, great apes and Barbary macaques have coexisted peacefully for a long time, the harmony was temporarily disturbed during opening hours on Sunday."

Well, that's one way to put it. The other way is that an hilarious Barbary macaque was unceremoniously, um, ingested by a big, stupid, completely humorless Sloth bear and his pals as dozens of stunned, slack-jawed Dutch zoogoers looked on in horror. And that's not funny.

Wait. Maybe it kind of is.

YES. It kind of is. The Dutch zoogoers part, anyway.

Ha! Well, that's a monkey for you. Entertaining those Dutchmen and Dutchwomen with rib-tickling antics right up until his own ribs were plucked from his body at the grisly, shriek-inducing end. Now that's commitment to the craft of funny.