Does Your Rotary Club Levy “Fines”?
This question was put before me this morning and I had to admit the answer is “no”. But still, I had to relate the following account of myself being fined $50 for a joke I told at the podium. Trust me, it was worth it.
Our club from time to time have a friendly joke competition where 3 to 5 members do bad standup and attendees vote with dollars for a winner. Rotary clubs often also have a relatively unfair system of levying “fines” for stuff like talking during a presentation, not muting your cellphone, or just as often, no real reason other than it’s your turn to pay. These fines are a buck and might raise to five dollars in the event the offense is … well…. inappropriate. The winner of the Joke-a-thon [aka Joke-off] gets to take home a huge trophy that I built from a bowling trophy I found and put the rear end of a horse on top. Most winners prefer to escape before they have to haul it to home or office. The contest is usually fun.
Thus, it occurred that I was at the podium with perhaps 50 attendees and guest, including a few kids, before me when I recited “The Lubuvicher Fire Brigade”. The text, below, was fine until I uttered the last two words. These were in the script and I had considered modifying it, but in the swing of it all I read straight through to my cost.
The Lubuvitcher Fire Brigade
The scene is somewhere in Central Washington State, that semi-arid flat lands East of the mountains. Not far from a small town there was a chemical factory. Round about midnight it caught fire. Being a chemical factory the blaze quickly became an all alarm inferno and every volunteer fire company from the area converged on the scene. Despite heroic efforts the fire continued to rage on.
The President of the company comes to plead with the firemen “All our formulae are in the office. If they burn we are ruined. I will reward any company that can save them with $50,000!” The firemen all try to do this, but they cannot get into the building. The President then yells, “I will make the reward $100,000!!”. Still, they cannot get past the fire.
Now, from a distance, we hear the single tone siren of an old, old firetruck coming. It is the Lubuviture Fire Brigade. It is made up of Jewish men, the youngest of whom is 70 who believe they can still fight fires. It quickly rolls past the other modern fire engines and crashing directly into the building by the offices. The men jump off the engine and fight the fire enough to save the formulae.
The President is so surprised and elated that he announces that he is raising the reward to $200,000!. It is almost 3:00 a.m.
Meanwhile, a TV film crew and reporter have arrived and go to Moshe Cohen, age 72 and the Captain of the company. The lights go on and the reporter asks, “So, Moshe, what are you going to do with all that money?”
Captain Moshe looks into the camera lens and replies, “Vell, dah furst ting we gonna do, is fix the brakes on that fuckin’truck!”
Oops and oh, dear. Yeah, I read it as written. Immediately the group commenced to struggle between laughter and “should I be laughing at this at a Rotary meeting?” I was fined $50, however, the view from the podium of the effect on the audience was totally priceless[1].
[1] To be completely honest, I was incoming president of the club and arranged the subsequent extraordinary fine so as to have a precedent for better higher fines during my term in office. While that did not happen, I still maintain it was worth every penny.