Pas compris

There is an unfunny American comic strip called Mallard Fillmore. Now it is no sin for MF to be unfunny. Or rather, it is a sin, and a bad one, but it is a sin shared by almost every other comic strip I have ever seen. MF, however, is special; it is popular with strident American rightwingers because it espouses a stridently American rightwing worldview. Given this paramount virtue, its unfunniness is a mere bagatelle.

The Editors has decided that MF could do with a funniness upgrade. His effort is an improvement, but then it could hardly be otherwise. (You are likeliest to enjoy The Editors's work if you approach it with an extremely visually-literal aesthetic sensibility.)

The Editors is also kind enough, or perhaps not, to link to the original series of MF whence he chose his subject. The eponymous protagonist is pissed off to find that the restaurant he is visiting, and in which he has received poor service, has a mandatory service charge; a forced tip, if you will. The duck rants on and on, over the space of several weekday strips, that it's terrible for him to have to tip a server, a server who has provided poor servive at that, because then there is no incentive for servers to provide good service, etc. etc. etc. Yes yes; one gets his point, such as it is, about a panel and a half into the first strip of the series. But perhaps MF's author thinks his target audience are slow learners.

I have no intention here of debating whether restaurant workers are underpaid, still less about any of the other things The Editors's commenters are debating. I wish merely to note that MF's author appears to have omitted the strip showing that his waterfowl is sitting in a restaurant in Communistia or Bolshevikistan or Europe or some other godless foreign hellhole where the service is compris. By all available evidence, the duck is in a good old American restaurant whose management has, for reasons of its own, chosen to make a service surcharge part of the price it demands for a meal.

Unless the wait staff have formed an anarcho-syndicalist commune and forced the manager at gunpoint to adopt the service charge, the manager decided that the service charge would be among the terms on offer. And unless there is a dollar in it for Jack Abramoff and his friends, the Republicans of the US Congress are unlikely to have passed a law requiring customers to submit to service charges and look happy about it. No, the restaurant is free to tell prospective customers, '...and we're going to add 15% on top of that for service, and if you don't like it you can fuck off down to Applebee's® or Denny's® or the Red Lobster®' (though it might wish to tell them this in more diplomatic terms). Similarly, the customer is free to respond, 'A what charge? A service what?! That's it; I'm fucking off to Applebee's® etc.' You see, although it has escaped the author of Mallard Fillmore, when you buy a meal in a restaurant, you are entering into a contract. The restaurant is your counterparty. And parties are free to enter into contracts on mutually accepted terms -- or to decline the contract if the terms are not mutually acceptable.

Freedom to contract -- you'd think that a pretty basic value for an American conservative. And there was a time, once, when it would have been. Nowadays, though, it seems like what they like best is whingeing. Enough of them do, at any rate, to provide a living for the author of a not terribly well-drawn and distinctly unfunny comic strip. That's all right though. Nobody is requiring me to give the man any money; nobody is requiring me to read what he has to say.

While you are there, don't miss The Editors's post about dinosaurs. The post isn't really about dinosaurs, but they figure prominently enough that everybody can enjoy it.