Newhouse News Service

There are no “your mama’s so lovely” jokes.

Ugly is something else. Like, when your mama looks in the mirror, her reflection ducks. Or when she entered an ugly contest, they said, “Sorry, no professionals.” Or your daddy never leaves because he doesn’t want to kiss her goodbye.

Your daddy? The elephant man paid to see him. People go as him for Halloween. When he threw a boomerang, it wouldn’t come back. And their baby – so ugly they had to feed it with a sling shot.

“Beauty is only skin deep,” the saying goes, but it’s often followed by the capper that “ugly goes clear to the bone.”

Ugly is tough. Dealing with it has to be tougher.

Maybe it helps explain “Ugly Criminals,” a study recently published by two economists, H. Naci Mocan of the University of Colorado at Denver and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University. It’s at www.econ.cudenver.edu/mocan/papers.htm.

“We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones,” they say. “Being very attractive reduces the individual’s propensity for criminal activity, and being unattractive increases it for a number of crimes ranging from burglary to selling drugs.”

Mocan and Tekin reached this conclusion using a survey of 15,000 high school students who were interviewed in 1994, and again in 1996 and 2002, at ages 18 to 26. One question asked interviewers to rate the appearance of students on a five-point scale from “very attractive” to “very unattractive.”

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But there are some general norms for looks, and students were rated by more than one interviewer. About 82 percent were rated “about average” or “attractive.” Seven percent were judged “unattractive” or “very unattractive.”

Among the looks-challenged, the crime rate was higher.

Mocan and Tekin note that studies have found attractive people are more likely to be hired for jobs and make more money. That provides “a direct incentive for unattractive individuals toward criminal activity,” they write – quoting a Miami man who was arrested for bank robbery and told police, “I’m too ugly to get a job.”

Better-looking people get more attention as babies, better treatment from teachers and more acceptance from peers. They’re considered more trustworthy.

And they don’t hear “so ugly” jokes.

I talked to someone who’s seen extreme examples – Dr. Anthony Griffin, the plastic surgeon on ABC’s “Extreme Makeover.” One of his TV makeovers was a Phoenix man who was convicted of murder “on his looks – they called him the Snaggletooth Killer” – and then cleared by DNA evidence.

“We live up to expectations of our peer group,” Griffin said. “We have less expectation for less attractive people.”

Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln and Babe Ruth were mocked for their looks, “but we still talk about them today,” he said. They’re exceptions on any scale.

I wondered if plastic surgery could help fight crime, but Griffin said he doesn’t advise it before age 18, well past the onset of ugliness. Most of his work serves self-esteem, by correcting distracting features, or vanity, by enhancing certain others.

He talked to me on the phone from Los Angeles during a break in a “Brazilian buttlift” – injecting fat from a woman’s lower back into her rear end. “She’ll be up walking tomorrow,” he said.

But probably not running from the police.