In the course of today’s Impromptus, I talk about Mohamed ElBaradei and Steve Martin. Two greatly disparate personalities, you might agree. A reader has sent a note involving both.

Martin told a few jokes in Carnegie Hall the other night — and also played the banjo. He remarked that the “bluegrass press” had dubbed him “the Ambassador of the Five-String Banjo.” (“The competition was between me and no one.”) Our reader writes,

“Roy Clark gives an intro to ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’: ‘This is a five-string banjo. It’s the only instrument invented in America, because we’re the only country that has the nerve.’”

And ElBaradei: Is he the most disgraceful Nobel peace laureate extant? I raise the question in Impromptus. And, on the theme of the peace prize, our reader says,

“The category on Final Jeopardy last night was ‘Nobel Peace Prize Winners.’ The ‘answer’ was something like, ‘These two men shared the prize with an Arab.’ No one got it, but I did, to my wife’s great amazement, because I follow Nordlinger!”

It’s nice to know that one has made some contribution in life . . .

P.S. “If I can help somebody, as I pass along, / If I can cheer somebody, with a word or song, / If I can show somebody how they’re traveling wrong, / Then my living shall not be in vain.”

P.P.S. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in 1994. Peres used the occasion of his Nobel lecture to say that Arafat deserved his share of the peace prize.