(FORTUNE Magazine) – In which Keeping Up seeks to build upon Yuletide merriment by presenting its first annual list of the year's ten most hilarious happenings. A funny thing about this exercise is that it started out to be our fourth annual list of the year's most depressing events, but we experienced unexpected risibility in the composition process. Can you guess why, dear reader? -- The discovery that upon finding himself near death in the Pacific at the age of 20, George Bush began thinking about Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment, as evidenced in the following rambling statement George gave Wall Street Journal editors who had asked him what it felt like to be shot down: ''What sustains you in times like that? Well, you go back to fundamental values. I thought about Mother and Dad and the strength I got from them -- and God and faith and the separation of Church and State.'' -- The 89-2 vote by the U.S. Senate in favor of an amendment introduced by Jesse Helms of North Carolina -- who usually gets those kinds of numbers in reverse -- which provided that federal laws banning bias in housing did not cover bias against transvestites, as some judge said they did. -- The consternated response of the Dukakisites upon being told that Europeans owned the Moog Automotive plant where Mike was deploring foreign takeovers of the U.S. The Duke's mysterious final word: ''I have no problem with foreign investment in a plant like the one I was at.'' -- The magical moment in the Omaha vice-presidential debate when panelist Tom Brokaw asked candidate Dan Quayle what our country should do about ''the 65 million American children who live with their families in poverty,'' and absolutely nobody, including Dan, Lloyd Bentsen, or the instant analyzers, noticed that this figure was twice the total number of Americans in poverty and marginally higher than the total number of American children (i.e., all those under 18). -- The moment later that same evening, when the instant analyzers were dwelling on the fact that Quayle had got through the debate without excessively scrambling his ideas or syntax. Peter Jennings of ABC said yes, that is true, and yet Bentsen scored heavily with his line about Dan not being Jack Kennedy. Peter added that it was definitely ''the evening of the moment.'' -- Evidence that ideological flames were at less than white heat in the closing months of the Reagan Administration: the recent proud boast of the Labor Department that in 1981-87 it had conducted 1,926 investigations of wage-and-hour law violations involving people who work in their own homes, vs. only 75 or 80 investigations in the six years before Ron took office. -- More evidence of the above: The Administration's decision to extend our grain agreement with the Russians, thus giving American farmers ''a secure source of exports,'' especially if the Russians abide by the terms this time around, unlike two years ago, when they ignored their wheat purchasing commitments because better terms were available in the open market, a detail politely unmentioned when the extension was celebrated in Washington. -- The SEC's continued refusal, once again endorsed by Congress in its latest go at expanding the law of insider trading, to state precisely what it means by such trading. -- Pat Robertson's possibly misguided efforts to win one of the debates among Republican presidential candidates by explaining his views on economic cycles: ''Certainly the trouble that we run into economically, if you use the term Kondratieff long-wave cycle, is a cycle of debt accumulation of which we have in our country now, $10 trillion, we have it about every 54, 56, 58 years on an exponential basis.'' -- George Bush's complaint that he had been hit with a ''low blow'' when Al Haig of all people asked him in a presidential debate just what he meant by that Church and State remark.