Life & Wisdom Quote by Nigel Rees

Nigel Rees lands a full economic critique in the shape of a pub-room heckle. "How come there's only one Monopolies Commission?" is a joke that works because it pretends not to know the answer. The question performs innocence while smuggling in an accusation: the very body meant to police concentrated power looks, at a glance, like a monopoly itself. Rees is poking at that peculiarly British faith in the committee as a solution to everything, paired with a steady suspicion that committees quietly become the thing they were invented to restrain.

The intent is less to propose institutional reform than to expose a rhetorical trap. Regulators have to be centralized to be effective; the punchline comes from treating that necessity as hypocrisy. It's a satire of category error: applying the market logic of competition to a function that, by design, can't be "competitive" without collapsing into redundancy or chaos. The humor relies on the audience knowing just enough civics to recognize the mismatch, and enough cynicism to enjoy the implication that watchdogs can turn into lapdogs.

Context matters: Rees, best known as a collector and curator of quotations and jokes, is operating in a late-20th-century climate where mistrust of bureaucracy and corporate consolidation travel together. The line echoes an era of privatization, mergers, and growing regulatory complexity, when people increasingly felt that power - public or private - loves to reproduce itself. The question is funny because it's plausible as a complaint, and sharp because it isn't entirely wrong.