WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - At a rally in this swank town on Thursday, Sen. John McCain cracked a joke about two Irishmen who go into a bar in Boston and discover a shared life back home in Dublin, where they went to the same school, and had many of the same friends. The punch line is that they find out they are twins.
 
Humor is a key part of McCain’s campaign for the Republican presidential party nomination in Florida, where he addresses supporters warmly at rallies as “my friends,” and often veers off into a joke.
 
On his campaign bus, dubbed the Straight Talk Express, he shared with reporters the deadly serious source of that humor, which, he said, helped him endure life as a U.S. Navy pilot in a prison camp in Vietnam.
 
“You just had to laugh,” said McCain of the five-and-a half years he spent in a Hanoi jail where he endured torture, after being shot down over North Vietnam in 1967.
 
“When you met someone who had been shot down and captured, you’d say ‘When did you get killed?’” he explained, to slightly uneasy laughter from the press corps, uncertain how to respond to humor that dark.
 
“When you are in prison and you’re totally under the control of someone else, that individual takes on gigantic proportions… What I found was that, if you can laugh, you can make fun of the guards, you can make fun of the camp commander … that was very important.”

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria (McCain chats with reporters on his campaign bus.)