Brouhahaha.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton; laughter)

Q: What don't we know about your spouse? , A: She has the world's best laugh., --Interview with Bill Clinton, Time.com, September 13, 2007.

In the great American tradition of Washington's teeth, Lincoln's Adam's apple, T.R.'s pince-nez, Nixon's five-o'-clock shadow, Ike's grin, Reagan's pompadour, and--more recently, less nostalgically--Gore's sigh, Dean's scream, and W.'s smirk, the small (but, thanks to the Internet, bigger than ever) universe of people who professionally or semi-professionally obsess about Presidential campaigns has been agog over Hillary Clinton's laugh.

This momentous subject began to elbow aside scarier topics like Iraq on September 23rd, when the junior senator from New York got herself interviewed on all five of the Sunday-morning political variety shows, a feat known as "the full Ginsburg," in honor of William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, who, on February 1, 1998, was the first to manage it. The Ginsburg may not be Clinton's favorite trophy, but she persevered. She met the press, she faced the nation, she rode down the fox. And, sure enough, whenever George or Wolf or Tim asked her something that struck her a certain way, she laughed.

The sound of Hillary's laughter, accompanied by urgent analyses thereof, has since been echoing from the tar pits of the Internet to the lofty peaks of the major mainstream media. It began with surprising amiability, on none other than "Fox News Sunday," just after that program's contribution to the Ginsburg. Chatting with the interviewer, Chris Wallace, about the way Clinton had burst out laughing at the opening question (which was about why she has "a hyper-partisan view of politics"), Wallace's colleague Brit Hume remarked that her laugh "is always disarming, always engaging, and always attractive."

By midafternoon, the Republican National Committee had rushed out a corrective to Hume's lapse into graciousness: an electronic "research briefing" titled "Hillary: No Laughing Matter." It was studded with subheads like "When Asked Whether Her Plan Is a Step Toward Socialized Medicine, Hillary Giggles Uncontrollably" and festooned with video clips of the former First Lady engaged in giggle-related activities. From then on, the commentary alternated between judgments of the quality of the candidate's laughter and assessments of its hidden meaning.

Media Matters, the indefatigable Web site that chronicles conservative broadcasting, kept track. Sean Hannity played an audio clip seven times and described the candidate's laughter as "frightening." Bill O'Reilly trotted out a Fox News "body-language expert" to pronounce the laughter "evil." Dick Morris, the onetime Clinton adviser turned full-time Clinton trasher, described it as "loud, inappropriate, and mirthless." Further down the evolutionary scale, the right-wing blogs bloomed like a staph infection. "Shrillary's" laugh is "chilling." It's "fakey fake fake fake." It's a "hideous hyena mating call." It's "a signal to launch her flying monkeys."

The respectables joined in, too, in their mannerly way. In the Times, Frank Rich wrote, "Now Mrs. Clinton is erupting in a laugh with all the spontaneity of an alarm clock buzzer." His Op-Ed partner Maureen Dowd wrote that Clinton's "big belly laughs" were a way of making the transition "from nag to wag." Meanwhile, in the news section, a story explored the question "What's Behind the Laugh?" And The Politico, a new online political newspaper, identified the problem as "a laugh that sounded like it was programmed by computer."