Thank you Union Street Guest House in Hudson, NY. Thank you for proving to the world that I am not the only person who has difficulty conveying dry humor in written form.

My failures, as evidenced by the angry comments, related to the following posts:

• Hyatt’s At it Again
• Take America Back – Boycott Hyatt
• And the unintentionally mean-spririted – Just Another Spiritual Points Traveler

But my comedic failings don’t hold a candle to the “joke” posted on the Union Street Guest House’s website.

As I first learned in this thread on FlyerTalk, the guest house in question posted as part of their policy for couples who were having their wedding there that:

If you have booked the Inn for a wedding or other type of event anywhere in the region and given us a deposit of any kind for guests to stay at USGH there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review of USGH placed on any internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event. If you stay here to attend a wedding anywhere in the area and leave us a negative review on any internet site you agree to a $500 fine for each negative review.

Soon after this policy hit the news, and the forums, a representative for the guest house evidently posted the following to their Facebook page, as reported by SweetDoug:

The policy regarding wedding fines was put on our site as a tongue-in-cheek response to a wedding many years ago. It was meant to be taken down long ago and certainly was never enforced.

Haha … ha.

Joke or not, it doesn’t seem to matter as FlyerTalkers are having a field day with this one:

Excuses me what what in the H*** happened to right of free speech and everyones right to an opinion? ~moeve

Looks like they may have just joked themselves out of business. ~dilbertsdaddy

Maybe suddenly in this craptstorm they are claiming it a joke. ~leonidas

What do you think? Was this a bad joke gone wrong? Or is the guest house management only trying to play it off as a joke now that it has gone wrong?

And once again, thank you Union Street Guest House, for taking some heat off the rest of us bad jokers.

Read the thread in its entirety: NY Hotel Fines Newlyweds For Every Negative Yelp Review Left By Their Wedding Guests