Jokes apart: Totti scores own-goal, Unicef is the winner

Then there’s the one about Totti’s not wanting to go out for dinner because he is reading the New Testament and wants to find out how the passion of Christ turns out.

Like American dumb blondes, Italy now has Francesco Totti to poke fun at. From the moment Totti (27) opened his mouth and began speaking in colorful Roman dialect, he quickly substituted for the Carabinieri, Italy’s military police, as the butt of national humor.

But the soccer star is getting the last laugh. A year ago, prompted by friends and family, he collected the jokes circulating at his expense and published them in a book that became an instant, and surprising, best seller, with more than a million copies sold.

Joke: When Totti is asked whether his book has sold a million copies, he replies: ‘‘That’s not possible. I only wrote one.’’

A second book, The New Jokes About Totti, Collected by Me, was published May 11 with a first run of 480,000 copies. Two weeks after its release, it was No. 3 on the best-seller list of the Turin daily La Stampa.

If Totti did not technically write the book, he did not keep the proceeds either; he is splitting them equally between a project for senior citizens sponsored by the city of Rome and a UNICEF project in the Congo to help street kids. ‘‘It was an enormous gift for us’’, said Rossella Del Conte of Unicef Italia, which netted about $305,000 from the sales and a lot of publicity. Totti was a UNICEF good-will ambassador before he made the donation.

The jokes play on a supposed dimwittedness that stems from Totti’s strong Roman accent. ‘‘He speaks Roman, so he makes some grammatical errors every once in a while; it was easy to criticize him’’, Vito Scala, Totti’s trainer and closest friend, said. ‘‘But initially he found a lot of the jokes offensive.’’

Gabriella Ungarelli, the editor of Varia, the division of the Mondadori publishing house that put out the book, agreed: ‘‘He wasn’t very happy that these jokes were going around on his behalf. He didn’t think it made him look good. But he turned it around and made it his own, and that has made him very simpatico with the public.’’

‘‘He’s poking fun at the dumb stereotype’’, Del Conte said. ‘‘It’s really changed his image; people look at him differently.’’

About 80 per cent of the books’ jokes were found on the Internet, and the rest were picked up at soccer stadiums during games. ‘‘All you had to do is go to the Curva Sud and you’d hear jokes’’, said Ungarelli, referring to the southern section of the Rome stadium where Roma fans cluster. Because the books had to have a broad appeal, especially with children, only G-rated jokes were included.

In an interview last month with Venerdi, the weekly magazine of the Rome newspaper La Repubblica, Totti even confessed to having a favorite joke. There’s a front-page headline: ‘‘Totti’s library burned to the ground; it had two books.’’ Totti is desperate: ‘‘I hadn’t finished coloring in the second one.’’

He tells that joke with an aw-shucks delivery in a videocassette that came out this month with the Milan sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport. The video alternates some of his more spectacular goals with Totti and his friends from the sporting world — like strike partner Christian Vieri and Roma coach Fabio Capello — telling Totti jokes. The video is now n its third edition.Totti is currently with the national team at their training site near Florence, cut off from reporters except for a nightly news conference. Even Totti’s wife-to-be Ilary Blasi, 23, is allowed to visit him only according to a strict schedule. He has said that they plan to marry after the European Championship, which begins June 12 in Portugal.

Joke: Blasi asks Totti, ‘‘Honey, do you love me, huh, do you love me, huh, do you love me?’’ He answers. ‘‘Hey, slow down, one question at a time.’’

The one thing Roma fans are not laughing about is the speculation that Totti may be sold to Real Madrid this year to offset the team’s dire financial straits. ‘‘I hope that never happens’’, said Paolo Altomonte, a retired Carabinieri officer and a Roma fan, who likened Totti to the idols of the ancient past. ‘‘It would be as if they brought the Colosseum to Madrid.’’