The Definitive Guide to Comedy
In case you missed it, HBO’s VICE News recently took a look at joke theft through the prism of an ongoing lawsuit by a Twitter user named Robert Alex Kaseberg, who alleges Conan O’Brien and his Team Coco staff on TBS stole jokes from him for use in his monologues. …
On Monday night’s Conan, Bob Newhart reminisced about his dearly departed friend, Don Rickles — they and their wives were fast friends for five decades. Newhart recalled the first night he and his wife got to see Rickles perform live in Las Vegas. Even though Rickles was performing late-night in …
Over the weekend, comedians caught a New Zealand food company in the act of pilfering a joke from the late Mitch Hedberg about race, and attributing it to its own company. Aunt Betty’s apologized today, admitting to stealing the joke: “Rice is really great if you’re hungry and want 2,000 …
Comedy Central may have gotten out of the “Fat Jew” business before the masses of protesting comedians got their way…but Josh Ostrovsky’s own countermeasure reveals just how deep the problem of Internet “curation” and “aggregation” goes. To wit. Ahem. Ostrovsky changed the bio of his popular Instagram “thefatjewish” to read …
This just in! Twitter has ramped up its policing of joke thieves, plagiarists and imposters of famous funny folks. A long-running Chris Rock imposter’s account (@ChrisRockOZ): Suspended! A fake Bill Murray? Now just a string of RTs and some private Instagram photos. The @itsWillyFerrell account continues with 1.76 million followers, …
The only sure things are death, taxes and schmucks will try to profit by stealing your jokes. At least my online friends at Death and Taxes are making an effort at countering the joke-stealing schmucks. On Tuesday, Death and Taxes took to Wikipedia to make certain everyone knows that Josh …
Kain Carter has 619,615 subscribers to his YouTube channel, which he titled “hotdamnirock.” For much of the past year, however, what Carter was rocking in his vlogs were monologues ripped verbatim from the mouth of late stand-up comedian Patrice O’Neal. Carter acknowledged this only after being called out on his …
Patton Oswalt wrote “a closed letter” to himself yesterday on the Internet, which means we all can read it, hopefully identify with at least part of it and take away lessons ourselves from it. Oswalt’s letter is an essay in three parts, covering, as the title suggests, joke thieves, heckling …
