The Room of a Million Jokes

Did you know Walt Disney’s comedy secret was a wall of filing cabinets? The year was 1932 and Three Little Pigs had just grossed $125,000 at the box office. To guaranteed good jokes, Walt built a team of “gagmen”. Not only did they write jokes, but they stored, categorized, and purchased jokes to save for later. That’s where Micky Mouse Magazine editor Hal Horne comes in. Walt heard that Hal had over 6 million jokes written and categorized, and after negotiations, he bought them for $20,000, almost half a million in today’s money ($467,479.71). Those filing cabinets went from NYC to LA and Dorothy Ann Blank was assigned to vet them for quality. It turns out, most were not just bad, they were unusable, and so by 1940 it’s reported the studio had landed at 1.5 million jokes with 124 categories in a room called “the room of a million jokes.”