Mirth Is More Expensive This Year

It’s no laughing matter--the law of supply and demand has raised the cost of humor.

It takes 3% more money this year to get a good laugh than it did in 1995, thanks to an increase in the Cost of Laughing Index.

Rubber chickens, one of the components of the index, rose to $66 a dozen wholesale from $60 a dozen last year. That’s because of “supply and demand . . . they get thrown on the ice a lot at hockey games,” said Malcolm Kushner, a humor consultant in Santa Cruz who has been compiling the index for 10 years.

Among other items included in the index, the newsstand price of Mad magazine rose 28% to $2.50 from $1.95 last year. But the price of Groucho glasses, at $15 a dozen wholesale, and arrows through the head, at $6 a dozen wholesale, remained the same because “they don’t get thrown on the ice at hockey games,” Kushner said.