220px-amy_klobuchar.thumbnail.jpgBelieve it or not, the real comedian of the Minnesota delegation to the United States Senate isn’t the guy from St. Louis Park. Our junior senator is in fact the serious-minded Talmudic scholar of the pair, whereas Amy Klobuchar, daughter of noted StarTribune journalist Jim Klobuchar, is the true cut-up here. Witness her jocular comment to one of the witnesses brought to the Sotomayor hearings during Panel Five on Thursday: "Maybe you know Lindsey Graham. In only the best ways, I’m sure." (This is made even more witty when one remembers Graham’s remarks in defense of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s adulterous ways: “I’ve got plenty of sins that I’m not going to share with anyone else.” He might not be sharing his sins just yet, but this won’t stop people on the left and right sides of the political spectrum from speculating about their nature.)

To show that this wasn’t a flash in the pan, here’s another taste of her wit, as demonstrated from a transcript of her appearance at the Washington Press Club’s Foundation dinner in February (the video can be found here):

Now, the tradition at the Congressional Correspondents dinner as you all know is to have one Democrat and one Republican speaker. As Speaker Pelosi pointed out, these are tough economic times, you could have saved money by asking Joe Lieberman. (He liked that joke I tried out on him.)

Instead, you asked me and a rising star in the Republican Party, Kevin McCarthy, who like every other rising star in the Republican Party must have once been on the short list for GOP vice president. How do you go home and tell your wife that it didn’t work out? "Honey, I was on the short list for vice president, but they didn’t think I was as qualified as Sarah Palin."

There was also this bon mot, on her decision to run for Mark Dayton’s open Senate seat in 2005:

But by 2005 I wanted a new challenge so I decided to run for the US Senate. Now you have to imagine what this was like. I didn’t know anyone in Washington, no one would return my calls, and I finally decided that I was just going to call everyone that I’ve ever met in my life and that’s when I set an all-time US Senate record, and this is true, I raised $17,000 from ex-boyfriends. Speaker Pelosi, I may have the all-time record in the Senate, but I know in the House, that record is held by Barney Frank.

Amy, if you ever find that the senator gig isn’t what you thought it would be, you’ve definitely got what it takes to do stand-up comedy.