“I kill a duck a day”

“I kill a duck a day” is William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s deliberately outrageous ultimatum to the university: a demand for funding delivered on camera while he holds Finny the Goose. The line converts a specific departmental budget shortfall into a memorable performance, and its later appearance on television complicates the humor by making the threat seem credible to viewers.

The Budget Ultimatum

Devereaux frames the demand around a practical shortage: without next year’s budget, he says, the department cannot hire the adjunct staff needed to cover freshman composition courses in the fall. He contrasts the missing money with the university’s commitment to a new building project, arguing that the institution has not funded roughly a dozen additional composition sections even though each would cost only three thousand dollars. The specific figures give the performance a real administrative grievance beneath its absurd threat.

He delivers the ultimatum in a fake nose and glasses, identifying himself as a department chair who wishes to remain anonymous. Against Finny’s trumpeting and the crowd’s applause, he shouts, “Starting Monday, I kill a duck a day until I get a budget.” He declares the demand nonnegotiable and says he wants the money on his desk in unmarked bills by Monday morning, or Finny will be served with orange sauce and cornbread stuffing that night. The language borrows the structure of a ransom threat, turning a request for departmental funds into comic coercion.

Broadcast and Reversal

The station’s editor cuts very little of Devereaux’s improvised speech. When the segment is replayed at The Tracks, the audience initially howls and applauds, and Missy makes him stand and bow. But the close-up changes the effect: Finny’s bulging eyes and flapping wings make Devereaux’s threat appear serious, while the fake nose and glasses look less like an obvious disguise than he had expected. Watching the footage, Devereaux begins to doubt that the spectacle reads as comedy to people at home.

The broadcast also puts the university’s representatives on screen. Dickie Pope and the local representative Jack Proctor appear briefly, but the bar’s boos drown them out before the producer cuts back to the laughing studio news team and then to a commercial. For a moment, Devereaux seems to have won the public performance: the audience treats him as a hero, even as the image of a man threatening a frightened goose unsettles his own confidence in the joke.

Echoes in the Protest

The ultimatum’s language returns in the campus protest that follows. When Devereaux sees demonstrators at the pond, they are chanting “STOP THE SLAUGHTER,” and some carry enlarged versions of his book-jacket photograph as the face of the protest. The slogan recasts his duck-killing threat as evidence of cruelty rather than a comic tactic in a budget fight.

The speed and organization of the protest sharpen the reversal. In about fourteen hours, its participants have assembled the signs, found and enlarged the photograph, and brought the message to the pond. Devereaux recognizes that some protesters are faculty members, while others have to be persuaded that the older man in front of them is the same person shown in the younger photograph. The phrase has escaped its original performance: what began as a demand for composition funding now circulates as a public image of threatened animal killing, with the joke and its consequences no longer fully under Devereaux’s control.