Two years ago, I met with my manager. He told me that my freelance-humor-writing business, as it was then structured, was unsustainable. His advice was to do a major re-structuring or consider closing up shop and going to work for Costco, which was hiring at the time.
After much soul-searching, I began doing something I once swore that I never would—I began outsourcing some of my humor-writing assignments to China.
My offshoring started innocently enough: a one-liner article here and there, usually one on a short deadline. Thanks to the time difference, I could send the assignment to Shanghai before going to bed, and wake up to find 25 to 40 jokes in my in-box the next morning.
Sure, many of the jokes I received were clear examples of intellectual-property theft from the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, John Mulaney, and Nikki Glaser. And far too many punch lines relied on references to Taiwan re-unification and the high cost of Shen Yun tickets. But with some tinkering and judicious editing, I made it work, all for a fraction of what it would cost me if I hired some entitled Harvard Lampoon graduate to write for me.
A few of my editors suspected I was up to something when I began crossing out the phrase “All jokes proudly crafted in the U.S.A.” at the bottom of my invoices. But as long as I was delivering comedy gold to them at cheap prices, they chose to play along and not ask any questions.
As market demand increased, I began outsourcing humorous essays, parodies, satirical commentary, and even malapropisms. Thanks to my Chinese ghostwriters, I was becoming a true American success story.
Then Donald Trump announced plans to impose stiff tariffs on all Chinese imports.
Like many companies, I tried my best to combat the coming surcharges by stockpiling as much inventory as my fun-factory workers could produce without running afoul of local child-labor laws. But that proved to be a huge mistake. I soon learned that jokes about The White Lotus, Gayle King in space, and Kristi Noem’s stolen purse have a very short shelf life. Hundreds of one-liners, quips, and wry observations, representing thousands of dollars, now lie in my comedy file cabinet, collecting dust, their “tell by” date having come and gone.
When the tariffs did hit, overnight, joke prices soared. The cost of a single one-liner shot up 27 percent. Charges for clever wordplay and knock-knock jokes more than tripled. Even puns and double entendres, normally cheap comedy staples, became pricier than a carton of eggs.
As for puckish literary allusions, they became a luxury item available only to the Musks, Bezoses, and Zuckerbergs of the world.
I’ve done my best to absorb these costs, but, like many small entrepreneurs, I’m slowly being squeezed out of business. I’ve concluded that I have no recourse but to pass along some of these tariff costs to the publications for which I write.
Effective midnight Saturday, my price for any humor piece will rise by anywhere from 20 percent to 145 percent. (I’m carving out a 90-day exemption for Air Mail.)
Just today, I received word from a Chinese supplier that their inventory of dad jokes is completely depleted, and no date is being offered as to when they may resume production.
Tariffs are no laughing matter. This essay is no joke.
I wanted to include a joke, but it was too cost-prohibitive.
John Ficarra is a former editor of Mad magazine
