Former roommate and current Rockiescast host Ted Burke passed along this bizarre article from the Associated Press, and nominated the following for his “favorite one-sentence paragraph ever in a news piece”:

Efforts to reach Christ for comment were unsuccessful.

That’s definitely funny, but my favorite is still the lead paragraph in this piece, which reads, simply:

Say cheese, pervert.

This makes me laugh for the ridiculous gravity of the statement, but also because, if someone actually came up to me and said, “Say cheese, pervert,” I’d definitely respond, “Cheese pervert!”

And every time I think about the phrase “cheese pervert,” I giggle incessantly for the next five minutes or so.

Plus, I can say with some certainty that the Daily News sentence was written in a wholly unironic fashion, whereas it would not surprise me to learn that a bored AP copywriter knew his sentence would be funny when he put it in his story.

I know this because I have been, in the past, a bored copywriter, and I used to try to slip funny things in headlines, blurbs and captions all the time. My best work came on the now-defunct olympic-sports site WCSN.com, when, after some Romanian dude won a gymnastics apparatus event in Europe, I wrote:

Romanian Impresses With Apparatus Showing

You get it? There are multiple meanings.

The photo I ran with it was priceless, too, as it featured the Romanian guy standing on his hands on top of the pommel horse with his back to the camera, facing a big crowd of gasping fans.

That was before I could blog when I needed to entertain myself at work. You have to get through the day somehow.