Meg is an Internet comedian. After a picture of Kanye kissing Kim at some ceremony, she photoshopped it to be a pic of Kanye kissing Kanye. It went viral. But her own tweet only got a couple hundred likes. Most of the viral came from an Instagram account called Fuck Jerry which has 14 million followers and reposted it without credit.
And Fuck Jerry does that a lot, and gets a lot of ad money, including from Comedy Central who should know better than to support someone who keeps stealing from comedians. So that made Meg kinda mad.
Stand up comedy started after the death of vaudeville. At first it was just throwing out one-liner after one-liner, the jokes didn’t have much effort put into them so no one really cared if you stole them. Later the acts and the jokes got more sophisticated and comedians did care.
You can copyright a joke, but it costs $35 to register, it can’t be too short, and just changing the wording gets around it. This is partly to stop stuff like “don’t you hate it when...” from being taken out of the commons. A comedy lawyer couldn’t find any case of one stand up comedian suing another for joke theft.
What do they do instead? A comedian gives three strategies.
Violence: every time you steal one of my jokes, I’ll damage your car.
Warnings: if you as a friend of the comic see a known joke thief in the audience, write a message on a napkin and have the waitress deliver it to the comic who can then finish early or avoid using their more precious material. (Robin Williams was a known joke thief. He said he just absorbed stuff and couldn’t remember where it was from. Comedian says Robin once stole one from him, but at least when he called him out he cut him a cheque. It said “sorry for the inconvenience”, not “sorry for stealing”. But it was $200 which was a lot of money in the mid 80s.)
Organizing: get venues to blacklist them.
Meg makes a campaign “fuck Fuck Jerry” trying to get people to unfollow. A bunch of famous comedians join in (I think Amy Schumer was mentioned). It works at least a bit, they lose 300,000 followers. That doesn’t sound like much, maybe there was more?
PM speaks to Elliot who is behind Fuck Jerry. He considers himself a curator, not thief. He wishes people would know he’s not a bad person. PM is not very sympathetic. He says he now asks for permission; Meg says that’s not enough. He says he’s thinking of starting to pay; PM says it’s unclear how that would work but it’s a bold thing to put on the air.
Planet money #904 (6 Apr 2019): Joke Theft
Meg is an Internet comedian. After a picture of Kanye kissing Kim at some ceremony, she photoshopped it to be a pic of Kanye kissing Kanye. It went viral. But her own tweet only got a couple hundred likes. Most of the viral came from an Instagram account called Fuck Jerry which has 14 million followers and reposted it without credit.
And Fuck Jerry does that a lot, and gets a lot of ad money, including from Comedy Central who should know better than to support someone who keeps stealing from comedians. So that made Meg kinda mad.
Stand up comedy started after the death of vaudeville. At first it was just throwing out one-liner after one-liner, the jokes didn’t have much effort put into them so no one really cared if you stole them. Later the acts and the jokes got more sophisticated and comedians did care.
You can copyright a joke, but it costs $35 to register, it can’t be too short, and just changing the wording gets around it. This is partly to stop stuff like “don’t you hate it when...” from being taken out of the commons. A comedy lawyer couldn’t find any case of one stand up comedian suing another for joke theft.
What do they do instead? A comedian gives three strategies.
Violence: every time you steal one of my jokes, I’ll damage your car.
Warnings: if you as a friend of the comic see a known joke thief in the audience, write a message on a napkin and have the waitress deliver it to the comic who can then finish early or avoid using their more precious material. (Robin Williams was a known joke thief. He said he just absorbed stuff and couldn’t remember where it was from. Comedian says Robin once stole one from him, but at least when he called him out he cut him a cheque. It said “sorry for the inconvenience”, not “sorry for stealing”. But it was $200 which was a lot of money in the mid 80s.)
Organizing: get venues to blacklist them.
Meg makes a campaign “fuck Fuck Jerry” trying to get people to unfollow. A bunch of famous comedians join in (I think Amy Schumer was mentioned). It works at least a bit, they lose 300,000 followers. That doesn’t sound like much, maybe there was more?
PM speaks to Elliot who is behind Fuck Jerry. He considers himself a curator, not thief. He wishes people would know he’s not a bad person. PM is not very sympathetic. He says he now asks for permission; Meg says that’s not enough. He says he’s thinking of starting to pay; PM says it’s unclear how that would work but it’s a bold thing to put on the air.