'Who was that lady ...?'

Does President Bush have a future as a stand-up comic? Or, more accurately, as a straight man? Russia's president Vladimir Putin has never struck me as a wild and crazy guy, but at this weekend's G-8 conference in St. Petersburg, Bush set him up for the perfect one-liner.

Bush's golden moment - or Putin's - came in a news conference after the two had a one-on-one talk Saturday. The gag line came down just like the old vaudeville saw:

Q. Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
A.That was no lady, it was my wife!
Aud.Yuk yuk yuk!

So instead of Abbott and Costello, we get Bush and Putin. Here's how they set up the gag, as reported by The Observer, a Sunday paper affiliated with Britain's The Guardian and posted to the Guardian's website:

Bush said that, during two hours of discussions, 'I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion. I told [Putin] a lot of people in our country ... would hope that Russia would do the same thing. I fully understand, however, that there will be a Russian style of democracy.'

Putin replied, smiling: 'I'll be honest with you: we, of course, would not want to have a democracy like in Iraq.' Bush interrupted to say 'Just wait' - a reference to Iraq's democracy being in its infancy - before Putin continued: 'Nobody knows better than us how we can strengthen our own nation. But we know for sure that we cannot strengthen our nation without developing democratic institutions. And this is the path that we'll certainly take; but certainly we will do this by ourselves.'

I wouldn't presume to guess whether Bush's set-up was intentional or not, but it was a classic.