LAUGH LINES : Punchlines

Hail to the Chief: LAPD Chief Willie L. Williams has filed a $10-million claim against the city:

* “It’ll never work. The only way to get that kind of money from the city of Los Angeles is by speeding and resisting arrest.” (Alex Kaseberg)

* “He denies he has a gambling problem. He did, however, recently refer to the nation’s attorney general as Janet Keno.” (Tony Peyser)

* “The city wants to settle and has offered Williams watered-down drinks and 99 shrimp cocktails for a year.” (Jerry Perisho)

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The Manifesto: “Now the Unabomber is really mad. He found out that the 850,000 copies of his eight-page, 35,000 word pro-environment treatise printed in the Washington Post consumed about seven acres of old-growth forest!” (Ed Stockly)

* “The Unabomber guy says he is against the use of sophisticated electric equipment and he wants us to return to a simpler, non-technological time. So, he could be a Radio Shack employee.” (Jay Leno)

* “You can’t blame him for being a little teed-off: 3,617 joke submissions to Laugh Lines in the past 18 months and not one nibble.” (Bob Mills)

* “USA Today condensed the whole thing down to 25 words and a three-color pie chart.” (Leno)

* “He’s already made another demand. He wants to do a ‘Friends’ guest-shot as Phoebe’s reclusive but wacky new boyfriend.” (Peyser)

* “The newspapers shouldn’t have published it. This is America. We don’t give in to homicidal maniacs. No, we give them recording contracts.” (Cutler Daily Scoop)

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Also in the news: Comic Argus Hamilton, on Leon Panetta saying that The Newt is the wrong guy to protect Medicare: “Panetta said you might as well put bank robbers in charge of protecting banks. Republicans told him to leave Neil Bush out of this.”

Comedy writer Alex Pearlstein, on tonight’s big fund-raiser at the House of Blues with President Clinton and VP Gore: “A lot of Sunset Boulevard hookers plan to attend. They heard a roomful of Democrats were paying big money for sax.”

Kenny Noble (FM 103.1), on AT&T; getting out of the computer business: “Owners of AT&T; PCs will be given new software--Curtains ’95.”

Cutler, on two Mafia informers testifying Tuesday at the trial of the century: “The writers of ABC’s new ‘Murder One’ just hung up their pens, bowed before the Simpson courtroom and said, ‘We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy!’ ”

* Adds Mills: “The Dream Team plans to next call as a witness actor James Whitmore, who’s expected to say that not only was evidence planted, it was also sprayed regularly with Miracle-Gro.”

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Richard Simon of Long Beach says that son Andrew, 5, wants to drop out of kindergarten after just one week. Among the boy’s reasons:

“The potty is too far away, and they don’t help you with your pants.”