Wanted: Upstanding citizen who laughs easily, can travel all over the country, is familiar with wireless technology, posting on YouTube and has an encyclopedic knowledge of comedy dating back to oh, 1900 or so. Send resume to the Comic Police Force.
Sound crazy? Well if you believe the noise out of the stand-up comedy world you’d think there was a need for a high-tech Comedy Police Force to help prevent Joke Theft. The unwritten comedy credo says most stand-ups don’t lift another comics jokes, but really, it happens all the time and has for years. But thanks to wireless video phones, blogs, YouTube and sites similar to it, pilfering jokes secretly is no longer a smart (if it ever was) or easy thing to do.
There have been a number of comics involved in public Internet mudslinging recently with the loudest perhaps involving “Fear Factor” host Joe Rogan and Carlos Mencia, host of Comedy Central’s “Mind of Mencia.” Rogan has in the past few months been bashing Mencia as a “joke thief” and referring to him as Carlos “Menstealia” on his blog. Rogan confronted Mencia on stage in California earlier this year and the entire battle was recorded and shown on YouTube. The video has lead to a “let’s disgrace Mencia” movement and YouTube now contains a number of videos comparing Mencia material to almost 30-year-old Bill Cosby jokes. Mencia maintains his innocence.
But Rogan has gone after others too, including fellow comedian Dane Cook.
There has also been a stink about some Loius C.K. and Cook joke material coming from Steve Martin. This from an OrlandoSentenial.com article: “Does this mean Louis C.K. and Dane Cook stole from Steve Martin?” Todd Jackson, a former managing editor at the humor magazine Cracked, writes on his comedy blog, Dead-Frog – A Comedy Blog. “Absolutely not. This is a joke that doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s going to be discovered and rediscovered again and again by comics – each of whom will put their own spin on it.”
Radar magazine, in a recent article about joke thievery among comics, called wacky comedian/actor Robin Williams a “notorious joke rustler” who is known to cut checks to comedians after stealing their material. Jamie Masada, who runs the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood, likened Williams’ act to a jazz player.
“He goes with whatever comes in his mind. That is what he is. He doesn’t go sit down and write what he is going to say on the stage.” If he learns later that he has used someone else’s material, Masada added, “he goes back afterward and says, ‘Here is the check,’ ” according to the OrladoSentinal.com site. And the list of pilfered joke accusations reaches into the stand-up royalty. According to the OrlandoSentinal article, Bill Cosby admits that early in his career he came up with a bit called “Little Tiny Hairs” that he said was inspired by a George Carlin routine about a football player doing a TV commercial.
In his routine, Cosby uses a hick-sounding accent to tell how he gets out of bed, goes into the bathroom, looks in the mirror and sees these little tiny hairs growing out of his face. “The phrase that makes everyone laugh is ‘little tiny hairs,’ ” Cosby said in an interview. “But I don’t get to ‘little tiny hairs’ if I don’t have what I lifted from George Carlin, and that is the whole idea of a football player who can’t act, who has an accent, maybe is an uneducated farm boy or something.”
“You have a better chance of stopping a serial killer than a serial thief in comedy,” said comedian David Brenner in the OrlandoSentinal article. “If we could protect our jokes, I’d be a retired billionaire in Europe somewhere – and what I just said is original.”That’s where the new Comic Police Force will come in.
