The economic indicator that Malcolm Kushner has kept since 1987 has just done something it never did before: It went down.
The Cost of Laughing Index -- a compilation of 16 leading humor indicators -- posted an annual decrease of 1.3%.
A big contributor to the decline was a decrease in the price of the pink gorilla singing telegram, to $150 from $250. Also down were dancing chicken telegrams and admissions to several comedy clubs nationwide.
Wholesale prices of rubber chickens, Groucho glasses and whoopee cushions remained unchanged. The price for an issue of Mad Magazine, and the fee for writing a half-hour TV sitcom -- $15,482 -- also remained unchanged.
Kushner, 56, notes the U.S. market has been saturated with an unprecedented surplus of cheap yucks -- a product of the economy's dizzying downward spiral.
"The worse the economic situation gets, the more the government tries to solve it, the more we laugh at what the government is doing," he said. "Want free laughs? Turn on C-Span."
Kushner said he created the Cost of Laughing Index as a joke, but it has been reported annually in newspapers and Web sites across the nation for decades.
In 1990, Johnny Carson used it in a long comedy sketch, with celebrities calling for a boycott of rubber chicken manufacturers until their prices came down enough for poor comedians in Eastern Europe to afford.
"It has become an official economic index," Kushner claims.
In 1997, the index was first included in a popular college textbook, Economics Today, by Irvin B. Tucker, an economics professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
Tucker told me Kushner's methodology is similar to the Bureau of Labor Statistics" collection of data for the Consumer Price Index.
"The bureau uses "price collectors" to contact retail stores and record average prices for a "market basket" of different items," he explained. "Malcolm Kushner's Cost of Laughing Index illustrates this procedure with a "market basket" restricted to comedy items. It therefore provides an innovative teaching tool for my texts."
Kushner is a self-described humor consultant based in Santa Cruz, Calif. He gives speeches, helps executives inject laughter into their presentations, and writes books including "Public Speaking for Dummies," and "The Light Touch: How to Use Humor for Business Success." He also is the curator of his own online museum at www.museumofhumor.com.
In 1976, he was among the first contestants on "The Gong Show." Instead of an animal trick, he did a plant trick, promising to make a fern jump through a hoop. He dressed it up in a cape and then just tossed it through. Somehow, he was not gonged.
Before pioneering the field of humor consultancy, Kushner toiled at a San Francisco law firm that represented airlines. One case involved a shipment of parrots -- some of which died during the flight.
Now, bear in mind, parrots are among the few members of the animal kingdom that can actually talk when they are not dead.
"The senior associate on the case .. had an idea: We could take a deposition of one of the surviving parrots," Kushner said. "To this day, I don't know if she was kidding because I never heard her joke about anything else."
Kushner quit to begin the less zany career that led to the Cost of Laughter Index.
Until recently, this index rose so steadily that Kushner pondered whether toilet paper printed to resemble $100 bills would one day be made more cheaply with real $100 bills.
He has yet to offer a complete explanation for its unprecedented downturn.
"Most Americans are conspiracy theory buffs," he said. "My theory is that [Bernie] Madoff is behind the decrease in the Cost of Laughing Index, but I haven't figured out how yet.
"I'm also proud to say that he's from my hometown, Laurelton, Queens, N.Y.," Kushner said. "Finally, there's somebody famous from my hometown."
Like most people, Kushner had never heard of the world's biggest confessed Ponzi schemer before Madoff's December arrest.
"Well, who heard of [Charles] Ponzi, before Ponzi got busted?" Kushner said. "I always thought Ponzi was great. I wished I was good at math so I could do that. But now I'm saying, "Gosh, the guy who beat Ponzi is from my hometown. The bar is getting set way too high for me to ever beat it."
Thankfully, the price of rubber chickens remains steady at $51 a dozen.
--Al's Emporium, written by Dow Jones Newswires columnist Al Lewis, offers commentary and analysis on a wide range of business subjects through an unconventional perspective. The column is published each Tuesday and Thursday at 9 a.m. ET. He can be reached at tellittoal.com, 201-938-5266, or al.lewis@dowjones.com.
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