What do you do when another comic does your joke?
How to deal with a tricky issue.
A convo at Threads about joke theft (or is it parallel thinking?)…
Erin Maguire: Comedian question - what do you do when another comic posts a vid of themselves a joke you’ve been doing for years?
jimtews: Start with a DM giving benefit of the doubt and go from there…When I sent the DM, I was a little drunk so I said "why are you playing madlibs with my material?" and that was probably the wrong approach. So I'd just say looks like we've got a similar bit, then send the oldest version you've got. If you've got the receipts it's on them to decide whether or not they want to be the one with a lifted bit floating around. Unfortunately audiences don't generally care. But you can hope that the comic will be cool and just take theirs down and move on
paulherberger: There's a saying that "you shouldn't attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance." My version of this for comedy is "Don't attribute to stealing what can be attributed to parallel thinking." I've had several jokes that I used to do, and have seen new comics do them almost verbatim. It usually comes down to them finding the same connection/ joke that I did. If something is supposed to be relatable it is likely also going to have multiple comics reach it on their own.
dear matt,
thanks for sharing!
i really like paul herberger's equating of "you shouldn't attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance" and "Don't attribute to stealing what can be attributed to parallel thinking." i've thought the same thing myself!
love
myq
Obviously, you challenge them to a duel.