So, as a comedian (or whatever it is I am), I have to come to the defense of that idiot from Qatar who joked about setting his shoes on fire after sneaking a smoke in the bathroom on a plane.

For those of you who haven’t heard, this dude from Qatar snuck a smoke on a flight to Denver, and when confronted, joked that he’d been trying to light his shoes on fire. So air marshals gang-tackled him and threw him in restraints, and fighter jets were scrambled to make sure that the guy whose only claim was an attempted, and therefore failed, try at terrorism didn’t somehow rub a magic lamp and conjure up a genie to finish the job.

I’m not sure how fighter jets would preclude such a thing, as they don’t usually carry air-to-genie weaponry, but I digress.

Point is, he wasn’t a terrorist, and the terrorist act he claimed to have attempted was, in his own joke, a failure. So I’m not sure that we needed to place the entire nation on lockdown and alert the president, but maybe I just don’t love freedom.

Yeah, I know, I know. Most of you probably would like to see him hoisted by his Quran and slowly executed by a .22-armed firing squad. But the fact is, you people are wrong. What’s worse, you’re un-American.

See, this is how the terrorists win — by changing us. There was a time when you could joke about (pretty much) anything in this country and nobody cared. You could joke in an airport in 1995 about some dudes in turbans giving you $100 to swap luggage, and while they might have checked your bags, you weren’t going to prison.

These days? Not so much. Crack a joke in Britain about stealing the crown jewels, and you spend the next few hours having your possessions spread on the floor while they strip-search you.

Apparently, when they took out the twin towers, they also took our sense of humor. It’s kind of sad, really.

What’s more, there’s a certain threshold of “not being a moron” that I feel most judgment calls must reach, and this one failed. Badly.

If some dude says he’s trying to set his shoes on fire, shouldn’t you at least GLANCE at his feet before scrambling friggin’ fighter jets? Seriously?

The guy was wearing sandals. Nonexplosive sandals. Sandals that were neither on fire, scorched, nor showing any signs of fusage.

And for that, we had a couple of F-16s riding shotgun on a passenger jet. Know what that makes us sound like? A bunch of humorless ninnies from, say, Oklahoma. Y’know, one of those states born without a natural funny bone, or much common sense.

Fact is, we actually defend humor in this country (for which we can all thank Larry Flynt). It has constitutional protection. That’s something to be proud of, because as the Supreme Court realized, humor (even when it sucks) is one of the most potent weapons when it comes to critiquing or finding fault with the system and how it works.

If you can sit there and tell me, with a straight face, that our air travel system isn’t woefully broken, with its shoeless air-marshal-overkill, then you, sir, would make a great comedy straight man. Or woman. Or in-between. Whatever you are.

This crap needs critiquing. It needs jokes. It needs insults. Because it’s horrific, and far worse than any alternative. I’d much rather they just hand us all guns as we board and tell us, sternly, “Only use these if you have to” than put up with the dehumanizing nonsense we go through.

The sad part is that it wasn’t an American making the joke pointing out the ridiculousness of our situation. It was some Qatari dude. And that, my fellow Americans, should be a source of deep, national shame.

We’re better than that. We should know a good joke when we see one. And we should tolerate a bad joke when we hear it: That’s the American way.