GERRY Adams, trampoline, dog - ah no, come on. Dog, trampoline and Adams unclothed? It's a wind-up, probably not the first one.
As a Republic poll once more puts Sinn Féin number one with voters and yet again shows Adams top of the leadership league, tying with Fianna Fáil's Micheal Martin for highest voter approval, the party's president might as well have a laugh at the ranks of haters.
The voters and the polls bounce around too. But Sinn Féin can be more than cautiously optimistic that they are now a fixture in southern politics.
What that does to their development as a political organisation, and what it does to their leader, is something else. For Adams, as for Martin McGuinness, this phase of the long peace has brought new stresses as well as who knows what unexpected satisfactions.
The Long War took stickability as well as ruthlessness, huge self-belief and self-sufficiency, though 'wartime' camaraderie no doubt padded out any gaps that appeared in the personal armour.
Did the war-to-peace leadership have much sense of what would come next? How could they have, given, apart from anything else, that the DUP cropped up on the northern scene so comparatively late?
Dealing first with Ian Paisley and then Peter Robinson must have borne small resemblance to those first years of being coaxed and flattered in Downing Street and Chequers, for a start.
Then the corporate SF leadership decided to move Gerry south. Whatever the unpleasantness from Fine Gael in particular and the jarring strangeness of his settling into the Dáil, for Adams this can hardly be as frustrating as sharing Stormont space with people still unable to exchange civilities... no, hold on, several things wrong with this proposition. McGuinness and Robinson very probably
deal civilly with each other behind closed doors, as on the recently agreed face-savers on benefit cut-mitigation, chiefly for Sinn Féin. Where frustration must kick in is on anything wider than the narrowest self-interest.
For want of better - and because they are good at both concerted effort and brassy spoofery - Sinn Féin has settled in to empty the expenses cupboards and
draft idle pretences like Caral Ní Chuilín's language proposals.
Meanness inspires meanness. The Gregory Campbell/Nelson McCausland line that says nationalists and republicans cannot be allowed to deliver on the Irish language, and that instead it must be mocked, is met by decisions like that of the Newry councillors to hold on to Raymond McCreesh park.
The SDLP's half-dozen could not bring themselves to face down, knowing the worst that would happen when they flouted HQ's directions would be a telling
off by a tattered leader.
The SDLP decline has left Sinn Féin in the north space to avoid development, as well as potential for change.
No new jobs in west Belfast or Derry, the backyards of both McGuinness and for so long of Adams; the mishandling and arrogance involved in the Casement redevelopment plan; investment poured into east Belfast, DUP spite and sheer ignorance towards Irish; all of this should mean voters turning away in disappointment from Sinn Féin. But turning to whom?
The letter-writers who urge good Catholic voters to think of their immortal souls and mark the ballot-paper for Jim Allister are almost certainly not prophets.
They bring to mind the tale from a reporter whose mother long ago said she was tempted to give her vote at the next election to a decent, likeable Alliance local candidate. 'But when it came to the bit my pen wouldn't write.' And on the doorsteps the smart money would be on SF canvassers to overcome any qualms they might meet. The northern party may be short of stars, but they still have loyal foot-soldiers, and a captive market.
Adams in the south has talent around him. Or they have him, as figure-head, a more useful figure-head than his haters allow. In the Dáil, and more usefully on TV screens, a line-up of brisk, sharp younger Shinners holds up well and sometimes does better than that. McGuinness has no such northern team. John O'Dowd may be the best of them but a smart and quick-tongued education minister who cannot be bothered to brush up his grammar is a sore listen.
The stone-faced Conor Murphy may loosen up, but if the party truly does have him picked for the leadership of the future he'd better be in training already. Because when McGuinness goes, as surely he will be allowed to with Adams post-2016, the last of the oldtime stardust goes with him.