Anyone who has ever performed stand-up is familiar with
the red light, the universal signal that warns dawdlers it's
time to wrap things up. In the '80s, comics at the Hollywood
Improv came up with a novel use for the light. When shining
steadily, it had the conventional meaning. But if the bulb
began sputtering, it was the comedic equivalent of an
air-raid siren, warning performers to lock up their original
material immediately unless they wanted to lose it to a
master thief.
Robin Williams, comedy's most notorious joke rustler, was in
the house.
Though the rap has followed Williams for years, he's not
alone. In the world of stand-up, joke-jackers are as common
as exposed brick walls and liquored-up hecklers—an
occupational hazard that eventually robs every working comic
of time-tested material. It's the dirty little secret of the
comedy world, a crime committed at every level—from amateurs
at open mikes to big-name pros on late-night TV. Though
rarely discussed outside the clubby, if sharp-elbowed, comic
community, the subject is the surest way to wipe the grin
off a funnyman's face. Daily Show correspondent Demetri
Martin learned the lesson during his first year on the
circuit, when he watched in horror as a comic brazenly
recycled a joke he had told the previous evening. "I
thought, Jeez, this is how it works?" he recalls.
George Lopez accused Mencia of ripping off his act for an
HBO special. "One night, I picked him up and slammed him
against the wall," Lopez told Howard SternUnfortunately, it
is. While most comics take pride in performing their own
material, many have built lucrative careers on borrowed
bits. Williams, for example, has long been lauded for his
ability to instantaneously improvise scenes and gags. But
while few question his gifts as a live performer, there's no
way to know how much of his sharp-minded inspiration over
the years has been provided by an unwitting writing staff.
"I've been in clubs in L.A. where Robin'll walk in the room
and whoever's on stage will just get off," says Boston
comedian Kevin Knox. Ritch Shydner, a former Improv regular
and coauthor of the book I Killed: True Stories of the Road
From America's Top Comics, agrees. "Robin is a ferocious
performer," he says, "but he isn't the kind who can generate
material, material, material. His style is to watch people
and regurgitate what he sees."
Steven Pearl, a veteran comic who, like Williams, worked on
the San Francisco circuit in the '80s, claims the star was
renowned for stealing jokes—a comedic Winona Ryder. When he
was caught, says Pearl, Williams sheepishly copped to the
charge by opening up his wallet. "I'd call him and say,
'Hey, what happened there?'" recalls Pearl. "And he'd say,
'Oh, sorry.' Then there'd be compensation." Though Pearl is
now reluctant to discuss details, he told Canada's National
Post that Williams wrote him a check for $1,000, and noted
that "there were a few more checks for substantial amounts
of money that kept my rent paid for a while." Even Robert
Klein, an old pal of Williams, commented in a 2001 interview
that "things would float into [Robin's] head that he heard
onstage—sometimes with unhappy results."
Some of Williams's longtime friends defend him, saying that
a key component to his brilliance is his lack of a
filter—his inability to block ideas from entering or leaving
his head. Which means that if Williams hears a joke, he
feels compelled to repeat it, even at the risk of
infuriating his colleagues. Scott LaRose, a veteran stand-up
and director of the upcoming Comedy Hell, a horror movie set
in the stand-up world, says Williams knows he has a problem
but is virtually helpless to stop it. "Everybody knows he's
a genius, but he's like SpongeRobin SquarePants," says
LaRose. "He's just a big sponge."
Still, while ripping off one-liners may seem more benign
than lifting lingerie from Saks, many comics beg to differ.
When a comedian is the first to tell a stolen joke at a
major gig or on national television, the public associates
the material with that comic, forcing the actual author of
the joke to drop the bit from his or her act. A comedian can
write the best joke of his career only to lose it to a sort
of "finders keepers" rule.
Joe Rogan, host of Fear Factor and formerly of The Man Show,
says he experienced this firsthand with a routine he spent
months developing on the topic of tiger fucking. When Rogan
saw a friend he'd performed with many times recycle his bit
on Comedy Central after simply changing the tiger to a
rhino, his claws came out.
The friend? Future megastar Dane Cook.
According to Rogan, when he angrily called to demand an
explanation, Cook promised to drop the joke. Rogan
considered the matter settled. Two weeks later, he caught
Cook at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles performing yet
another bit of his, which Rogan had already released on a
CD. Rogan, a full-contact Tae Kwon Do champion, says he
confronted Cook on the spot. "I said, 'What the fuck are you
doing?'" the comic recalls. "'You know that's my bit! You
heard me say it! What the fuck makes you think you can take
my material and do it onstage?'"
Hicks's friend Colleen McGarr saw Leary perform an
uncomfortably familiar set. "I was aghast. To me it was
Bill's material done in a shabby, humorless way, but
shocking enough that people would respond to itRogan isn't
the only one who has accused Cook of lifting material.
Another veteran comic recalls seeing Cook performing one of
his very physical routines at the same club. "I go, 'Don't
do that bit,'" says the comic, "and [Cook] goes, 'Oh, sorry
man. I won't do that bit.' But he did it plenty of times
after that."
And not long ago, comedy-oriented message boards and blogs
such as A Special Thing, Redban, and Cringe Humor were
jammed with posts claiming that Cook had ripped off comedian
Louis C.K., who starred in HBO's recently canceled Lucky
Louie. Posters noted that three bits from Cook's
Retaliation—"Struck by a Vehicle," "Itchy Asshole," and "My
Son Optimus Prime"—sound remarkably similar to "Guy on a
Bike," "Itchy Asshole," and "Kid's Names," all of which are
featured on C.K.'s CD Live in Houston.
Listening to the two albums, there's no denying certain
similarities. "Guy on a Bike" and "Struck by a Vehicle" both
wonder how to warn someone in a split second that they're
about to be hit by a car. C.K. yells "Bad thing!" while Cook
sputters "Uuuuuuuhh!" In "Kid's Names" and "My Son Optimus
Prime" both men discuss giving children weird names, with
C.K. choosing "Ffffffffffffff" to Cook's "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr."
Is it possible Cook wrote his bits without ever hearing
C.K.'s? Parallel thinking—when comics write the same or
similar jokes independently—is extremely common. Comedians
view the world through a similarly honed comic prism and
often produce identical premises or punch lines. When the
pedophilic priest scandals broke, for example, comics all
over New York City riffed on it with variations of "Hey, I
was never abused—what was wrong with me?" lines. None of
them appeared to have cribbed the joke; it was simply the
obvious gag.
The notion that parallel thinking explains the case of Cook
and C.K. seems far-fetched. But for his part, C.K. has tried
to downplay the issue. "Okay, this kid is stealing from me.
And making lots of money. Three bits on one CD," he wrote on
A Special Thing's bulletin board in 2005, adding, "Just so
you know, guys, I'm not going to do anything about this....
I'm not going to court over a bit called 'Itchy Asshole.'"
The controversy did little to hurt Cook, whose Retaliation
was the best-selling comedy album since Steve Martin's A
Wild and Crazy Guy.
Other comedians agree there's little upside to accusing
colleagues of theft. "My ex-boyfriend had a great philosophy
about joke stealing," says Comedy Central favorite Lisa
Lampanelli. "'Write more." If you're gonna be a freakin'
baby and whine that somebody stole your jokes, guess what?
You can write more."
Accusations of comedic skulduggery have also dogged Denis
Leary, who has spent much of his career denying that he
borrowed his act wholesale from Bill Hicks, the edgy,
anti-establishment legend who died of cancer in 1994.
Critics have long cited a laundry list of alleged
similarities between Leary's 1993 album No Cure for Cancer
and Hicks's earlier work, from Leary's angry, chain-smoking
persona to specific jokes about tobacco, health nuts, and
lame bands. The charges grew so widespread that they
inspired a scathing joke among some of Hicks's friends that
Leary had become famous only because, well, there's no cure
for cancer.
Colleen McGarr, a onetime talent coordinator for the
Montreal Comedy Festival and a close friend of Hicks's was
backstage at the fest in 1991 when she first saw Leary
perform what seemed to her an uncomfortably familiar set. "I
was aghast," says McGarr, who later became Hicks's manager
and fiancée. "To me, it was Bill's material done in a
shabby, humorless way, but shocking enough that people would
respond to it."
"I was shocked that [Leary] could still work in Boston,"
says Rogan, who claims he has also watched Leary recycle old
bits by Ray Romano.
But other comics who were close to both men dispute the
charges. "I think it's all a little exaggerated," counters
Comedy Central regular Nick Di Paolo, who also knows Leary
from the Boston scene. "Before anyone knew who Bill Hicks
was, [Denis] was funny and original, and he always did the
smoking stuff."
Indeed, when comparing No Cure for Cancer with Hicks's
material from that time, the case seems murky. There are
several similar jokes, including a riff on the irony that
John Lennon was murdered while lesser talents were allowed
to live. But in this case the argument for parallel thinking
seems plausible. Even McGarr—who says that Hicks himself
held no animosity toward Leary—now feels less sure about any
wrongdoing. "You listen to the albums back to back, and it's
complicated," she says. "Denis did lot of things in comedy
after No Cure for Cancer. So, it's not like it's a
continuing thing." (Interestingly, in her biography on
Hicks, American Scream, Cynthia True reported that Hicks
himself was accused by Sam Kinison of stealing Kinison's
act.)
While the genial, hardworking Leary is generally liked and
admired by most of his peers, Comedy Central star Carlos
Mencia is almost universally reviled. According to Rogan,
the famed Comedy Store in Los Angeles has even instituted a
Mencia early-detection signal similar to the Improv's for
Williams, though considerably less high-tech. "Every time he
walks in, the guys in the cover booth just start yelling 'Mencia's
here!'" he says with a laugh. (Both Mencia and Leary
declined repeated requests for comment.)
Nick Di Paolo claims the Comedy Central star also swiped
material from him, and notes that "every Latino comic wants
to kill him."
One in particular is sitcom star George Lopez, who told
Howard Stern last year that Mencia stole 13 minutes of his
act for an HBO special, inspiring him to pay Mencia a
personal visit. "I just had enough," Lopez recalled. "So one
night at the Laugh Factory, I just picked him up and slammed
him against the wall."
Unfortunately, there's generally no accountability for comic
larceny—even when the culprit cops to the crime. In his book
Gasping for Airtime, Jay Mohr owns up to an unusually
high-risk robbery: When he was a cast member on Saturday
Night Live, Mohr watched popular New York comedian Rick
Shapiro do a set in a local club, transcribed it word for
word, and submitted it as his own work for a sketch that
made it to air. Several weeks later, after Shapiro sued
Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels showed Mohr a tape of
Shapiro doing the bit and asked if he had seen it before.
Though Mohr denied it, the show settled with Shapiro for an
undisclosed sum. Mohr, however, suffered no repercussions at
all.
How much is a stolen joke worth? The value of a joke has
fluctuated considerably over the years as the nature of
entertainment has changed. In vaudeville days, a comedian
could perform the same 18-minute bit around the country for
a decade, earning a living from a set barely long enough to
fill a second-bill act. (Such was the value of material that
W.C. Fields reportedly once paid a thug $50 to break a
comedian's legs for stealing his jokes.)
But a different ethos developed in the Catskills in the
'30s, where comedians blatantly took notes while watching
competing acts, and thought nothing of working the best
jokes into their own sets. Milton Berle, television's first
star, made no apologies for his nickname, "The Thief of Bad
Gag." (Bob Hope held a long-standing grudge against Berle
for jokes stolen from him during their vaudeville days.) As
comedy became more personal in the era of Lenny Bruce,
George Carlin, and Richard Pryor, jokes came to reflect a
performer's individual sensibility and their theft became a
more hurtful offense. In his autobiography, Dick Cavett
wrote that the borrowing of his friend Woody Allen's jokes
was so pervasive that Cavett routinely called Allen to
report the latest incident. Allen finally made him stop
because "it pained him."
In some instances, the thievery is so absolute that a
performer is left with nothing, a carcass picked apart by
comic vultures. Take Will Jordan, a comedian and
impressionist who gained fame in the '50s with an
exaggerated impression of Ed Sullivan. Even if you've never
actually seen Sullivan, you're probably familiar with his
mannerisms, and credit for that goes to Jordan, who was the
first performer to nail the talk show host's stiff body
language and exaggerated dyspepsia. His Sullivan
persona—with the host's encouragement—became part of the pop
lexicon, an impression as revered and repeated as those of
Groucho Marx and Howard Cosell.
But with success came appropriation. Comedians like Jackie
Mason, Jack Carter, and Rich Little worked up their own
Sullivan impressions, and Jordan's value plummeted. He
watched in horror as bookings were canceled because Mason or
Carter had entertained with his Sullivan at the same venue
the week prior.
"The stuff they stole from me improved their lives one-tenth
of one percent, but hurt me this much," says Jordan,
spreading his arms wide during an interview at his
memorabilia-strewn one-bedroom apartment in midtown
Manhattan. "Jackie wasn't doing Ed Sullivan, but doing me
doing Ed Sullivan." Recalling his propensity for twirling on
his toes while mimicking the host, Jordan adds, "He's doing
the spins! Sullivan didn't do that!" Once other comics began
absorbing Jordan's Sullivan inflections and movements, fear
dried him up. "I was afraid that anything I would write
would be stolen," he admits. "It's a stupid reason, but I
think it's the truth."
Jordan went on to make a small fortune as General Patton on
the corporate sales meeting circuit in the '80s, and last
played Sullivan in the 2003 romantic comedy Down With Love.
But these days he works just one or two days a year. To add
insult to injury, he wasn't even called when David Letterman
held a special "Impressionists Week" on his show last
November—at its home at the Ed Sullivan Theater.
Given those stakes, it's not surprising that some comics
occasionally resort to violence to even the score.
When veteran Boston stand-ups Kevin Knox and PJ Thibodeau
caught wind of a young comedian named Dan Kinno doing their
material a few years back, they hatched a plan to exact
revenge at one of Kinno's upcoming gigs. Kinno walked into
the club to find the pair waiting for him, along with 60 to
70 other comics who, Thibodeau says, were "waiting to see a
lynching." After ushering Kinno into the club's tiny green
room, Thibodeau (who stands six foot, four inches and 250
pounds) and Knox (also six-foot-plus) interrogated the
smaller comic until he confessed. "I slammed him into the
wall and started spitting in his face," says Thibodeau. "I'm
screaming, 'We're supposed to be friends!' and Knoxy was
kinda pimp-slapping him. The kid started to cry. At that
point, I walked away." Kinno never went on that night, and
found himself shut out of the local club scene. Soon after,
he moved to Los Angeles, where he has since appeared on the
Game Show Network and MTV and is currently finding success
on the club and college circuits, with regular gigs at the
Improv Comedy Clubs around the country.
"People take plagiarism so seriously in all other forms of
media, whether it's music, newspapers, books," Rogan says
glumly. "But with comedy, it's like, 'You're on your own,
f*@!%$r!'"
Larry Getlen from the magazine
www.radarmagazine.com
