Joke robbers

I have been seeing this a lot on websites and stuff and I wanted to say my piece. People have been circulating video of a confrontation between Joe Rogan and Carlos Mencia which shows both of them, at the comedy store, battling it out on stage over the accusations that Carlos steals jokes from other comedians. This is a persistent rumor that has been going around since Carlos got big. Another person is Dane Cook stealing from Louis CK (allegedly).

Here is the gist of these situations. Unlike acting and singing, all a comedian has is his material, that is what separates him from other comedians. At the end of the day it comes down to something you worked and busted your ass on so you want to make the money for that joke. The problem lies in the ability to tell if a joke was really stolen or not. At time you and another person on the other side of the country can come up with similar sounding jokes. The person who gets the credit for it is usually the bigger comic. The big problem is that comics are out here all the time just trying to get by and get the next gig and if your joke sounds like a similiar one from a bigger comic then you may not get booked.

With that being said, we can not confuse stealing with inspiring. For instance, I see nothing wrong with a person coming up with their own joke because of something I have said. I have seen this done before and it does not bother me one bit. I think that a lot of comics out there may see a bit or something and then go write a joke and it is similiar but not the same damn joke and that is where things get murky. Is this good? Is this something you want to encourage? The basic truth of the matter is mostly all topics have been done before. The key is putting you extra spin on it to make it your own. How many people have sung the national anthem?

I think the thing that bothers people the most is that people are making tons of money off of something they think they did first. If it is word for word or just to much the same then yes that may be true. With the Carlos Mencia Joe Rogan thing, they showed a clip of a particular comic's bit that involves putting a fence around the border of Mexico. And then Carlos' bit and they did kinda sound alike but when you do material from current events you have to expect that to happen. Dane Cook did two jokes, one on having a kid with a weird sounding name and then watching someone get hit by a car and I have to be honest with you from the sound of it, it seemed as though that is not a joke you can write and then have someone else write something really similar to that. I am not saying it can't happen, but that does not really sound possible.

You can't really prove someone stole your joke unless they took it word for word and if that is the case then they are really stupid. I fear that with the age of the internet, people are going to start throwing accusations at the comics on top so they can try and grab what they have. If you go back 30 years or so people were doing the exact same thing as now, but since they didn't have the internet then they never really knew that someone that saw their show in New York was doing their material in L.A. I make an effort to write way to much material because then if someone says you are biting off of something of their's then you can not do that joke keep doing your other stuff and show them that it is going to take more than one joke to make or break a career...unless you are Micheal Richards.