EMERGENCY BUDGET 2014 EXCLUSIVE

STAFF LEARN OF CHANGES AT "ALIAS POOR YORICK"

Here quick, hold this. Don't ask questions, this is an emergency. If anyone asks it's full of unmarked punchlines. And  you haven't seen me. Unless it's Richard Branson, in which case you have, but it was somewhere else. Tell him I needed the money for cab-fare and I'll get it back off Gina. Whatever. I'll sort it out later. You have to realise we have an emergency on our hands. The former editor has left this publication in a hell of a state and we're going to have to take drastic action. At this rate we'll have run out of jokes by the end of the decade, in fact damn it man we're running out of comedy material even as we speak. I don't care what the World Comedy Fund say about the health of this publication, we need to make cuts. Lots of them. I love making cuts. It make me feel alive.  Cut everything. Particularly wages. Paying people is killing us and it has to stop. They started poor and it's their natural state. Paying them anything at all is what's confused them in the first place.

And we're going to have to stop spoon-feeding people their comedy. The page of entitlement is over. You can't be expecting us to give you set-ups, exposition, and punchlines. We need you to have some input. Here we go then ...

"Three Rabbis walk into a bar. The first one orders a martini..."  Well. Off you go. Get to work. If you want a punchline, you're going to have contribute.

I was talking to Treasurer Joe Hockey the other day & he said to me "Jeff" ( Well I'd given him $10G to remember my name) "Jeff", he said to me. "If you're trying to sell people a duck, and you haven't got a duck, sell them a chicken and tell them it's a duck. If you haven't even got a chicken, tell them it's a special emergency invisible duck, and charge them double. Then you set a Commission of Audit to find out what's happened to all the ducks. Make sure it's stacked with right-thinking people and tell them to come back with a report saying the only way to solve the duck shortage is by cutting the minimum wage".

There is also no danger whatsoever, I repeat none, no chance in a million years of a price increase for this fine publication. Having said that, and I did, and by golly I meant it, it would be fiscally irresponsible to rule out the possibility of an access augmentation levy. This will involve you the reader paying me the publisher exactly the same money as you've always paid, only a bit more. Not much. You'll hardly notice the difference. I knew you'd understand.

(If for some reason you do not agree to absorb this access augmentation levy, your ALIAS POOR YORICK will be translated by Bing: Look, a camel. Is a rich needle heaven, what ?)

And Gina. You know the score. Keep the money coming in and I keep the jokes "nice". No more of that stuff about you being the misbegotten spawn of Satan.

Okay. Some people were working on the beginning of this joke, but I fired them. This leaves a bit of  gap, but you'll be right. Here's your punchline: " So the other horse says: fuck me, a talking dog"

'ALIAS POOR YORICK'  ...... Always unreliable. Always will be.