Pigs Is Pigs by Ellis Parker Butler — Two Guinea Pigs Become an Accounting Catastrophe

This story is a small masterpiece of exasperation from 1905. Ellis Parker Butler wrote "Pigs Is Pigs" as a jab at corporate red tape, and somehow, more than a hundred years on, it has only gotten funnier. Two guinea pigs arrive at a railway express office. A clerk named Mike Flannery decides they are pigs, the customer insists they are pets, and a single nickel of disagreement sets off a cascade of letters, departments, and, well, arithmetic. You’ll see.

Ellis Parker Butler, 1869 to 1937, was one of America’s most prolific humorists, an Iowa-born writer who turned out thousands of stories, essays, and poems across a long career. He published more than thirty books, helped found the Authors’ League of America, and wrote for nearly every major magazine of his day. Yet it was a single short story, "Pigs Is Pigs," dashed off in 1905, that made his name. It sold in the hundreds of thousands, inspired stage and screen adaptations, and quietly seeded a whole comic tradition of small creatures multiplying beyond all reason, a lineage that runs straight through to the tribbles of Star Trek. Not bad for two guinea pigs and a stubborn clerk.

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