Has anyone ever seen Superman and Bertie Ahern at the same time? Does the Taoiseach pop into telephone kiosks and emerge with his underpants around his trousers?
And how long can the Ahern roadshow continue defying all the laws of politics, diplomacy, good manners, and for all I know, gravity and combustion?
For years he has consorted with a woman not his wife as if she were his wife. Which is fine. Except we have expected foreign governments to accept the fiction that this woman was his wife, not the real Mrs Ahern back in Dublin. Even the Grand Viziers didn't go in for that kind of caper. And he got away with it because everyone in Ireland was too wretchedly scared of being considered reactionary and illiberal to point out that Celia Larkin was not his wife, and that it was an outrage to the rules of hospitality for us to insist that foreign governments pretend that she was.
Well, she's not any more. In the great tradition of an Irish solution to an Irish problem as adumbrated by his great protector, Charles Haughey, Celia Larkin, having once been made a second unmarried wife in a uniquely Irish way, is now the beneficiary of a divorce, Irish style. This doesn't even involve intoning, I divorce thee thrice so much as her finger pointing at the door.
And now, as far as I can understand, he's on good terms again with wife mark one. But truly there isn't much I do understand about all this. For who can say anything after the shenanigans in France last week? That, now, was perhaps the nadir of Irish statehood, brought about by a collision of two celebrity cultures, one of Irish politics, the other of show business. One culture cultivates the press; the other is bought by it.
Thus you had Irish journalists expelled from their rooms and physically assaulted by bouncers in order to protect the investment of a British celebrity magazine in the marriage of the daughter of the prime minister of Ireland. This risible farce might have some precedent amongst European democracies, but I certainly can't think of it.
The fact that the wedding was held in France even as the Irish tourist industry is vanishing round the U-bend was bad enough; for both celebrities, political and showbiz, bring their duties too. But to have the "rights" to this grisly little charade being bought by "KO" or "Tarrah" or some other British celebrity magazine puts the entire affair beyond the reach of parody, satire or caricature.
Yet that's not the interesting bit. No, indeed, the really fascinating aspect is the dog which didn't bark. For there should have been an enormous outcry in Ireland over the Taoiseach's agreement to conform with the grotesquely demeaning demands of celebrity showbiz culture, like a male Imelda Marcos without the shoes. But there's been nothing whatever. Instead of a wave of anger sweeping the country, politicians are talking about the ban on smoking in pubs, and making private schools pay the full cost of employing teachers.
These are important things, it's true. But they're not as important as the honour and sovereignty of the Irish state. They're not as important as the first minister of the land being seen to behave with dignity and decorum abroad. They're not as important as the good name of Ireland being upheld by its elected first minister.
Yet Pat Rabbitte, who normally can be guaranteed to conduct himself as Pat Stoatte, has so far been as speechless as a beheaded bunny. Enda Kenny has retained the studied air of agnostic vagueness which is his unique contribution to the principles of leadership.
Even the Greens, who can be relied on to huff and puff at almost anything, are strangely silent, as if they have just discovered that they are the majority shareholders in British Nuclear Fuels, and that Trevor Sargent made a secret fortune expelling little Indians from their Amazon rainforest homes, and then felling the trees.
So Bertie Ahern, the accountant who isn't an accountant, the graduate of LSE who didn't graduate from LSE, has once again been almost inhumanly lucky. In the Middle Ages, they would have burnt him as witch; except, of course the faggots wouldn't have lit. Had he been in the Space Shuttle, he would have been its only survivor; and of course, would then have sold his story to Rupert Murdoch, and returned to Drumcondra, to his pints of Bass, and the Taoiseach's office. He is able to glide through the field of battle, untouched by shot and shell, the Forrest Gump of Irish life.
Except, except: deep in the heart of Fianna Fáil, there is a passionate if unspoken attachment to Ireland, to its soul and its soil, to its dignity and its honour. I might deplore the men of 1916; but Fianna Fáil do not.
The secret, unconscious test they measure any leader against is: did the men in the GPO give their lives for this? And those men emphatically did not die for the elected leader of the Republic to consort with bemuscled goons from a British glamour magazine who are hammering his fellow Irishmen.
Remember the name, Gellardon. It could well turn out to be the krypton of Bertie Ahern's political career.
Or then again, maybe not.