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| Thomas Harty |
Accusations of joke stealing are as old as comedy. Sometimes, they are accurate. Milton Berle famously quipped that Bob Hope didn't have anything he didn't have a week later. I feel most of these cases are unintentional. Comedians generally think alike and notice the same things. It's not surprising that two or more comics would come up with similar jokes. In my own experience, I've had to eliminate jokes that I felt were too similar to other comedians. I think this is generally the best policy. Sometimes a joke can be altered enough to make it sufficiently different again, but I prefer to discard them as it forces me to write new material.
The 3 videos below I think best illustrate the spectrum from parallel thinking to joke theft. I call theft in the first case because Leary stole the voice box bit (and many others) from Bill Hicks:
The next video I think best illustrates parallel thinking:
And here we have plagiarism of plagiarism:
Thomas Harty
Contributor
Bill Gorgo, who teaches beginner comedy classes At Zanies, in an article in the Chicago Tribune detailed how he overcomes the obstacle of doing bits too similar to everyone else's:
ReplyDeleteWhat Gorgo will do is come up with a joke and take it "three or four jokes down the line" -- or rework it that many times. This way, he says, you'll have reached the new joke from a direction no other mind would have taken.
"If you listen to comedy as much as comedians have to, every time you think of a premise you find that everybody else has done something similar to it," says Gorgo. "That makes you feel like a hack, if too many people have worked on it."
Gorgo says that by reworking a joke a number of times, "you get deeper into who you are, and you've written an unique joke that`s yours and no one else`s."
Thanks for that tidbit on Gorgo!
ReplyDeleteSometimes you can take the same set-up and write a different punchline or take the same punchline and create a new set-up. I do this all the time with The Aristocrats! joke.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who plans to start going to open-mics, I worry about this all the time. I personally despise joke stealing and to me it is one of the lowest of lows.
ReplyDeleteI personally don't mind if maybe another comedians work inspired a bit of your own, I might be the only one who thinks this but, there is a fine line between parallel thinking and straight up theft.