Speaking about what makes it funny, I finally read Ain't No Dog and I found the smoking thing to be more dark humor than an anti-smoking message. Not that the message isn't there-- but again--I didn't even know about quesada's ban when I read Spider-man so I didn't really feel it was editorially driven with Spidey and I don't feel it was that way with X-Force.
The humor of Wolverine's not smoking is that he is precisely that he is a hypocrite, and he is tortured almost just as much as the guy he has strung up. But not by smoking, by his bad habbit of killing. And after the cig falls out of the guys pocket you then see from the Cyclops flash-black that Wolverine's quite a jerk. So by the time he looks at the cigarette for the last time and he's like, well at least I quit smoking, it isn't meant to be a public service announcement, it's meant to be a joke-- wolverine's killing and being a jerk is this reoccurring bad habit of his that he just doesn't see. It's like Dennis and his "Mister Wilson" you know no matter how he says it something bad is gonna happen.
