Coming soon to BT
When I was the editor of Cal’s humor magazine, the Squelch, we did a ten-year anniversary “best-of” issue. Putting the issue together involved going through the archives and reading every old issue of the magazine. In the process, we realized how unoriginal we all were, specifically when it came to “Free ____” jokes. As Zack ‘The Hammer’ Fornaca put it in the tenth-aniversary Words From The Top:
We are unoriginal, we are worthless, and if our magazine had ceased production four pages into the first issue, the world would be a much better place.Example: in Volume 9, we run a fake ad reading “FREE MUMIA!” with smaller text underneath reading “With purchase of Gatorade at any federal prison.” Get it? A clever pun on a well known slogan. Funny, right? Well, sort of. Funny in the way that the Squelch’s Volume 6 “FREE TIBET (with purchase of a Tibet of equal or greater value)” fake ad is funny, which itself is funny in the same way that the Squelch’s Volume 4 “FREE EL SALVADOR (while supplies last)” fake ad is funny, which, for whatever reason, seems not so unlike the Squelch’s Volume 3 back page spread devoted to trite jokes written on bathroom stalls, one of which was…God, this stings. I can’t continue. My soul can only turn to ash so many times before I start driving knives into my own heart just to get it over with.
In summary, the Squelch did this exact joke in 1995, which was itself ripped off from a Squelch joke from 1993, and then we further plagiarized it in 1998, and God knows how many more times after that. That being said, this is a stylish t-shirt design.
