Snubbed by Esquire -- UPDATED

Wow. Ouch. In mid-February, sent Jokes Every Man Should Know to Esquire with a nice letter. I used to know the guy who edits the magazine. Good guy. Great magazine. The May issue of Esquire arrives! There's a feature: "75 Skills Every Man Should Master." Awesome. Here's what they have in there:

38. Tell a joke. Here's one:
Two guys are walking down a dark alley when a mugger approaches them and demands their money. They both grudgingly pull out their wallets and begin taking out their cash. Just then, one guy turns to
the other, hands him a bill, and says, "Hey, here's that $20 I owe you."

That's word-for-word the way it's in the joke book. Actually, it's an old joke, but the above rendering of it is double-familiar. The way it's written in Esquire and in the joke book is exactly the way I edited it for GQ in 1999, when I did a feature, the "Funniest Jokes of All Time." It reads tersely because I had to keep each joke very short.

FOLLOW UP: I figured I had nothing to lose sending an email to Tom Chiarella, who wrote the Esquire "75 skills" package. I said I admire his writing (very true) and laid out the above info. He wrote back -- said he was sorry and understood my frustration. They wanted to do one of the 75 items about telling a joke. An intern got three jokes off the Internet, Chiarella says, and "I chose that one because it was so tightly written -- backdoor kudos I suppose.... In any case, I apologize for the overlap...I hope it seems explainable. " It does.