iranPress Secretary Dana Perino. (Photo: Ron Edmonds/Associated Press)

“This has not been my week,” Press Secretary Dana Perino joked over the weekend, a few days after a widely-circulated dust-up with Helen Thomas, a longtime White House correspondent who believes there’s no such thing as a rude question. In the video, Ms. Perino strongly disagreed.

But that would not be the last time that she provoked critics. On Saturday, she appeared on NPR’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me” during a segment that guarantees embarrassment for its well-known guests, or as the introduction gamely puts it:

The subjects are “asked ridiculous questions about completely random topics and then being mocked and punished for your wrong answers.”

And mocked and punished she was, but not for batting 1-for-3 on the subject of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer minutiae. Instead, it was for volunteering up front the kind of canned tale of self-deprecation that is often seen on late-night-television. The Washington Post retells the relevant passage about a recent question in the White House briefing room that uncovered a glaring historical blind spot for her:

“I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”

So she consulted her best source. “I came home and I asked my husband,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Wasn’t that like the Bay of Pigs thing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Dana.’ ”

An account from another reporter who deals with her on a daily basis — this one from The Chicago Tribune’s Mark Silva — also noted the appearance more as a laugh-in-passing.

But bloggers saw it as a moment of truth, with one suggesting that she resign and a leading liberal blog expressing shock: “Seriously?” More from The Carpetbagger Report:

I’d argue that this is more than just a minor embarrassment for a senior White House official. The significance of the Cuban Missile Crisis is probably greater now than at any point in the post-Cold War era.

Less sober reactions are stacking up in Google’s Blog index, with comments attached to at least one post yielding several inevitable uses of the word “bimbo.”

In short, the critical response of Ms. Perino’s appearance on a comedy show was devoid of any sense of humor whatsoever — a perhaps unsurprising result since most folks on the Web learned of the episode via quotes shorn of the frequent outbursts of laughter and pervasive zaniness.

The original broadcast, of course, is the most fair source for your own opinion, but a transcript also does a decent job of conveying the all-in-good-fun mood.

Ms. Perino herself is probably not bothered by all the laughing at her expense. Thick skin is a requirement for the job of White House spokesman, and she put to rest — at least for the moment — a much different label than one she earned on Friday: “Icy Queen.”