Imagine waiting backstage, notes in hand, every punchline carefully crafted and sequenced for your tightly rehearsed 10-minute comedy set. And then you hear one of those very jokes coming out of the mouth of a fellow comedian on stage. The audience roars with laughter and applause. It’s your joke, but it’s the other comedian raking in the plaudits. What do you do? How do you prove that you were the one who wrote it first? And does it even matter?
Comedy is as much an art form as any painting hanging in a museum gallery. Joke-writing is a skill that requires imagination, linguistic ability, an eye for the absurd and a lot of practice. Even a short 10-minute set takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears. “It takes time to build a set,” explains comedian Jeeya Sethi. “That’s why people put their thoughts on Twitter, it’s proof that they wrote it first.”
The Indian Copyright Act protects the efforts of comedians, as long as the joke is recorded or written down, so there are legal options for artists whose work has been plagiarised. And yet, despite these protections, joke theft remains a prevalent issue. Even internationally, where copyright litigation is much more common, comedians will often get away with stealing jokes. So why do we not take this issue seriously?
When Your Joke Isn’t Yours Anymore
Even the most popular and globally famous comedians, like Robin Williams, have been accused of stealing material from others. Comedian and commentator Joe Rogan had once spoken about Williams being infamous for picking up jokes.
“I think (Robin) wanted to kill more than he wanted to be ethical at any cost,” Rogan said. “Part of that manic sort of style is this constant need to have a bit about anything that you’re talking about ever. Killing was more important; filling that hole inside of him was more important than anything.”
Robin Williams confessed to stealing jokes during an appearance on Marc Maron’s podcast. “In the old days, if you hung out in comedy clubs which I was doing almost 24/7, you hear things and then, if you’re improvising, you’re all of a sudden repeating (jokes) and going, ‘Oh, shit.’ My brain was working that way.”
Although Williams was never taken to court over joke theft, he did settle privately with many of the comedians who accused him of stealing their material, paying them thousands of dollars as recompense.
Sometimes, comedians do take the fight out of the green room and into the courtroom. A notable example is the legal battle between two UK comedians, Kae Kurd and Darius Davies, over the ownership of a joke about a “smart refrigerator.” Through surveillance footage from various open mics, the court was able to determine who first performed the joke. While the legal battle ultimately gave one comedian the ownership of the joke, both comedians are now more famous for their feud than for their comedy. In the pursuit of intellectual property, they sacrificed their reputations and relevance.
That’s one reason why, for many comedians, taking the legal route is simply not worth it. They are racing against time to keep their material fresh and relevant. A drawn-out case might prevent a comedian from using a stolen joke, but it wouldn’t help in maintaining the joke’s relevance.
An Indian comedian, who prefers to remain anonymous, shared that if someone stole her joke, she would rather sell it to the thief than engage in a legal battle. “The audience has already heard it. Why would I perform the same joke after they’ve heard it from someone else?” she said.
Shared Ideas or Stolen Jokes?
The issue with copyright in comedy becomes even murkier when you consider the nature of the jokes themselves. Comedy is often tied to current events. In the case of major news events, like elections or the release of a controversial movie, comedians everywhere rush to craft the funniest take. Multiple comedians may independently arrive at the same punchline, having been inspired by the same event. In such cases, ownership of the joke becomes more subjective. Rather than fighting for intellectual property, the comedians usually accept that one of them will win the crowd’s favour.
“If sometimes two, three, four people have the same thought that usually means that thought should be dropped by all of them because it’s too common and too basic or none of you have done anything unique enough with it,” says Shamik Chakrabarti.
And what if you are just ‘inspired’? Comedians don’t always just directly lift jokes word-for-word. They can twist, tweak, and make a joke their own, and the audience would never know any better.
“The joke is secondary, it’s you and your persona that’s number one,” emphasises Chakrabarti. “I used to always preciously hold on to my jokes, like no this is my joke, I will keep this forever.. You can’t, you have to let them go. The joke is not what will make or break your career eventually. If you can write enough good jokes then you’ll write another one.”
Comedians Taking Matters In Their Own Hand
As joke theft is almost as old as comedy itself, it would be fair to think that some wise and oft-snubbed comedian would have found a way to address the issue. Unfortunately, there’s no plug-and-play solution. Unlike the Indian film industry where artists rely on their respective councils for issues related to copyrights, royalties and other rights, the comedy circuit does not have a dedicated council. For now, comedians rely on unofficial tactics like side-eyeing thieves, banning them from line-ups and/or simply being the bigger person and writing a better joke.
One problem is that trying to get comedians to work collectively is a little like herding cats. There have been previous attempts to organise comedians, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement. “The comedy scene has been trying to put together a council for misconduct but never succeeded,” says Sethi. “[The idea was] to help comics who might need legal guidance, or if some comic was getting harassed the council would address it.”
A trial balloon for a comedians’ body was sent up in 2022-23, with the hope that senior comics could help the newer comics navigate harassment issues. Pavitra Shetty who had led the attempt to set up the body, says: “As we tried to make it a legal structure, we required a lot of documents and signatures. But because in the comedy circuit, everyone is all across the country, everyone has their own schedules, their own tours, not everyone is able to be available at the same time. We wouldn’t even meet the quorum for meetings, it became a little bit tough.”
Instead, the comedy community often relies on informal networks to manage joke theft. Comedy club owners and gig promoters know and speak with each other, so comedians who are known for stealing material risk being banned from performing at certain venues. This ‘code’ is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules; thus the system is completely based on the discretion of the clubs. Unlike a copyright lawsuit, an industry-wide blacklist is not legally binding.
The fact that comedy—unlike, say, film and TV work—isn’t restricted to one medium but can be performed and distributed over social media makes things even more difficult. It’s near impossible to keep track of everything that’s going on. Who will go through every tweet, reel and/or set to figure out who cracked the joke first? A dedicated comedy council could mediate between comedians and comedy clubs, and perhaps censure the high-profile offenders, but it’s no magic bullet.
Copyright, in its current form, isn’t useful to comedians except in the most egregious of circumstances. And a legally recognised body that works through the courts will be too slow and too unwieldy to help. But perhaps there’s a middle ground here—a council that formalises the current informal network of comedy producers, clubs and artists, and provides a forum to address such issues within the comedy community might be exactly what we need.
But until the comedy scene becomes organised enough to make that happen, comedians who get ripped off may just have to do what they do best—turn their experiences into punchlines. Because the only thing worse than stealing a joke is not being funny enough to write another one.
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