Justice & Law Quote by Kin Hubbard

The joke lands because it’s a status update disguised as a punchline: Hubbard takes a once-reliable punchline about the police force as a last resort and simply swaps in “the advertising game,” implying the new profession has inherited the old stigma. It’s not just an insult; it’s a cultural temperature check from an era when modern advertising was rapidly professionalizing, ballooning with mass newspapers and national brands, and yet still carried the whiff of hustle, hucksterism, and moral slipperiness.

Hubbard’s phrasing is doing quiet work. “A fellow” is everyman-speak, inviting the reader to nod along as if they’ve always known this to be true. “Used to be” signals a shift in the pecking order; he’s documenting a change in public suspicion. Where policing once stood as the fallback job for the incompetent or unqualified (itself a cynical barb about civic institutions), advertising now becomes the place you go when you can’t make it anywhere else - because selling attention is easier than earning trust.

Calling it a “game” is the sharpest blade. Games have rules, but not necessarily ethics; they reward cleverness over virtue. That word choice frames advertising less as craft and more as playacting: manipulating perception, gaming desire, winning by getting inside people’s heads. Coming from a journalist, the jab also carries trade anxiety. Newspapers lived off advertising revenue, even as ad culture threatened to drown out reporting’s authority. Hubbard isn’t only mocking ad men; he’s warning that persuasion is becoming the default career path, and the rest of us are the marks.