Obviously, this situation is the result of good intentions and botched policy. It's like the old saw:
Q. How many state regulators does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Eight. One to climb the ladder and seven to
Sorry. These blackouts always come at the worst possible times.
See, deregulation of the column probably would have gone ahead OK, except the liberal-bias editors insisted on placing caps on the cost consumers would have to pay per joke. But consumers were still demanding lots of humor, so I had to go far and wide looking for material to steal, like the one about the Minnesotan who came home drunk and his wife told him to go out ice fishing until he sobered up. So he takes his ax and his fishing pole
thundering one more time "This is the rink manager! And I ASSURE you...THERE ARE NO FISH BENEATH THE ICE!"
So obviously, getting class, mega-yuk material like that ain't cheap. It got to the point where the time and cost of obtaining humor could not possibly be offset by what I was getting in return. And then to top it off, all the wholesale laugh brokers got together and jacked up the price.
Well, our "Smart Growth" governor insisted the public wasn't going to be made to pay the higher joke price I was paying and it became obvious there was only one thing left to do. I snubbed my nose at him and said "Grow this!" before making a deal on the black market for a lot of untaxed jokes that had been generated by dubious sources in Central America and flown here by small plane.
So after the deal we're sitting on a beach at San Carlos riffling through some unmarked, non-sequential bills when a manta ray, two sea urchins and a Portuguese Man O'War swim up. After looking us over for a bit the manta ray looks up and says
and the Mafia don pushes his white hat up off his brow, scratches his head and says "How do you start a flood?"
Well, the old ladies down at the cabana weren't going to like that one, you bet you me. But I'll be hanged if I'm going to go into bankruptcy until I've scraped the lint basket with a toothpick, so to speak.
So the lesson here is that you can't unilaterally cap the cost of jokes, because that gives humor consumers no cause to conserve. They will greedily lap up four jokes a paragraph when it strains me to come up with one joke every three.
And you can't trust the joke middlemen not to get greedy and raise the price unconscionably when they sense a joke shortage.
In the end, what was true before deregulation is true after deregulation. From where I sit, there's just nothing funny about government interference.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist
