Congress Legalizes Smokey Bear Impersonations

The $2.3 trillion spending bill repeals criminal penalties for using Smokey Bear’s likeness without government permission.

Your tax dollars at work.

Fair warning: You are still forbidden to impersonate all other Smokeys, like:

Smokey “Chen-OO-kah” Robinson


or this Smokey:

or this Smokey:

or of course, Smokey Stover

TRIVIA: It was the Smokey Stover cartoons in the 1930s that created the term “foo fighters”

The surreal nonsense of the Smokey Stover strips was still appearing weekly in the Sunday comics when I was a kid, and I always found the strip bizarrely entertaining, even though all the inside jokes were lost on me.