JOHN MARTIN

Get in line if you want to know how many humour columnists it takes to change a lightbulb. I’ve got a more pressing riddle: how many humour columnists can you squeeze into a lighthouse?

That’s the question I asked in an email I sent to Steve Jeffrey, former editor and proprietor of the Anchor Weekly in Chestermere, Alberta, about 14 years ago.

Back in 2011 he supposedly wrote a weekly column called Sittin’ in the Lighthouse — except he actually wrote only 10 of them all year. The rest he borrowed (in the way pirates “borrow”) from a number of humour writers in the US and from little old me in Canberra. He changed them just enough to localise them, then plonked his photo on top.

He used two of my old columns, Rebel with a Pause and Fame at Fortune Finds Me at Last, which I’d written in 2002 and 2003 and posted on my website, readily available for any Tom, Dick or Steve to copy, paste and suddenly “remember writing.”

The alarm came in the form of an email from a Californian writer who had gathered the evidence. Even though the offending columns had been scrubbed from the Anchor Weekly website, he had Google archive copies. Proof.

I fired off a brisk email to Mr Jeffrey and copied in someone else senior on the newspaper. I also sent notes to the two major Calgary papers and the Canadian Journalists Association — all addresses found online. This was not a coordinated attack, but I assume the other humour writers reacted much the same way. One went to the Alberta Press Council, which moved with admirable speed.

The Calgary Herald later ran a report on Mr Jeffrey’s resignation.

He told the paper, in an email, “I really don’t have any way to defend myself. I did use articles for inspiration but thought that I had changed the content enough to comply.”

Yeah, right. Pull another one.

I wrote those columns years ago, and I’d long given up any hope of earning a dollar from them. Given the Anchor Weekly carried advertising, perhaps they were more lucrative for him.

Truth is, I’m rather chuffed to have been read 10,181.2km away.

Unlike the Calgary Herald, I never heard back from Mr Jeffrey, which is odd. You’d think a bloke running a lighthouse would at least flash a signal.

Shame he never became my pen friend — I had more questions, like: Am I now famous in Canada?

“For your information,” I wrote to him, “I have never sat in a lighthouse. It gives me vertigo — the same sick and queasy feeling I have right now over this issue.

“Incidentally, how much room is there in your lighthouse? I am informed that my two columns were among 41 you borrowed from hard-working columnists over the year. Is there room for all of us in the lighthouse — bearing in mind I don’t want to be sick on anyone.”

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