Pay the Two Dollars
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Pay the Two Dollars is a vaudeville sketch in which a man is subject to increasingly draconian and unnecessary legal jeopardy because of his lawyer's unwillingness to pay a two-dollar fine. The catchphrase of the sketch has entered the popular lexicon to refer to a penalty that, even if the penalized party regards it as unjust, is too trivial to be worth contesting.
Pay the Two Dollars was created by Willie and Eugene Howard for George White's Scandals of 1931 on Broadway.[1] In the sketch, Willie Howard plays a humble city-dweller riding the subway with a lawyer friend, played by Eugene; when he is told by a conductor that he will be assessed a two-dollar fine for spitting on the floor of the train car, he seeks to pay it immediately and end the matter, but the lawyer insists on contesting it. Willie's character is then arrested, whereupon the lawyer mounts a series of preposterous legal challenges, each of which only increases the amount of trouble the protagonist is in until at last he is sentenced to death; at that point, the lawyer finally succeeds and gains clemency from the governor.[1] The sketch was later included in the 1945 film Ziegfeld Follies, a tribute to vaudeville, featuring Victor Moore as the defendant and Edward Arnold as the lawyer. For the New York Times, Bosley Crowther called Arnold and Moore's version "passingly funny."[2]