{"id":1534,"date":"2016-04-24T15:19:15","date_gmt":"2016-04-24T20:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bowdoinglobalist.com\/?p=1534"},"modified":"2016-04-24T15:19:15","modified_gmt":"2016-04-24T20:19:15","slug":"a-joke-by-any-other-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/art\/a-joke-by-any-other-name\/","title":{"rendered":"A Joke By Any Other Name"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2006, comedian Tammy Pescatelli told the following joke on Comedy Central\u2019s <\/span>Half Hour<\/span><\/i>. \u201cWomen dress for other women. That\u2019s why, men, if we love you, we dress you for other women, too. That<\/span>\u2019s why we dress you stupid. Because we want a woman to look at you and think, \u2018He\u2019s cute, but I can\u2019t fix all of this!\u2019\u201d In 2015, Amy Schumer\u2019s movie <\/span>Trainwreck<\/span><\/i> contained a joke with a similar premise. \u201cYou dress him like that so no one else wants to have sex with him? That\u2019s cool.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In January, comedians <\/span>Wendy Liebman, Tammy Pescatelli, and Kathleen Madigan turned to Twitter to vent their frustrations with Schumer\u2019s joke theft<\/span>. In response to the tweets, a Youtube user compiled clips from source material to compare with Schumer\u2019s stand-up, movie, and TV show. Though the popular original video has since been removed, the \u201ctrainwreck,\u201d so to speak, had already left the station. In the eyes of many, <\/span>Amy Schumer was a plagiarist.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a few months since Schumer\u2019s brush with controversy, and the comedienne\u2019s career hasn\u2019t suffered any lasting setbacks. But the accusations of joke theft leveled against her are worth reconsidering: beyond just deciding whether or not to indict Schumer, we should look to her as litmus test for where we, as an audience, stand on plagiarism in comedy. <\/span><\/p>\n

It seems like almost any comedian worth their salt today has been accused of similar thievery. Instagram\u2019s \u201cThe Fat Jew,\u201d the Daily Show\u2019s Trevor Noah, late night staple<\/span> Conan O\u2019Brien, stand-up comic Dane Cook, Gabbie of YouTube\u2019s The Gabbie Show, and the infamously blackballed Carlos Mencia have all been caught in plagiarism scandals. Some comedians survive the witch hunt better than others: Though Trevor Noah\u2019s transgressions flew under the radar as he rose to <\/span>The Daily Show <\/span><\/i>fame, Carlos Mencia\u2019s very name is now practically synonymous with joke-stealing (\u201cCarlos Men<\/span>steal<\/span><\/i>ia\u201d). If joke theft is so widespread, then why do we even bother condemning it? Doesn\u2019t everyone steal everything in art? <\/span><\/p>\n

The short answer is no. Sure, it\u2019s convenient to argue that everything is in some way derivative and true originality is nonexistent, but this doesn\u2019t make for a very practical definition of plagiarism. While there isn\u2019t a universal cross-disciplinary definition of plagiarism, comedy has some pretty harsh standards. In the past, experienced comedians like Patton Oswalt and Joe Rogan have acted as moral arbiters of what does and does not constitute plagiarism; according to <\/span>a <\/span>2013 blog post<\/span><\/a> written by Oswalt, if you know you\u2019re thieving, you\u2019re immediately in the wrong. If you don\u2019t realize you\u2019re treading on someone else\u2019s turf, you\u2019re probably still in the wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oswalt argues that most people just aren\u2019t funny, and joke theft arises from people who lack the talent to be original and envy the prestige that comedy creators enjoy. His argument stems from an intense respect for joke writers\u2014a respect which Oswalt theorizes is not shared by those who would steal the credit. While Oswalt can\u2019t prevent joke theft from happening, he sure can insult joke thieves:<\/span><\/p>\n

What I can hopefully stop \u2013 or, at least, change for the better \u2013 is the public (and media\u2019s) response to joke thieves, by hammering away at this same, exhausting refrain every time I see some thumb-sucking \u2018think-piece\u2019 by a writer who should fucking know better, cyber-quacking away about \u2018cover songs\u2019 and \u2018vaudeville\u2019 and a million other euphemisms and deflections away from the simple fact that <\/span>an uncreative person took a creative person\u2019s work, signed their name to it, and passed it off as their own for their personal glorification, monetary benefit and career advancement<\/span><\/i>. There\u2019s no wiggle room there.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In one respect, Oswalt is right: comedians who blatantly rip off entire jokes word-for-word deserve to lose face. But it seems unfair to portray Amy Schumer as some nefarious plagiarist poaching stand-up jokes from the back of a comedy club. <\/span><\/p>\n

For all his absolutism, Oswald implicitly acknowledges that plagiarism is not by any means a universal concept, even within the comedy world. Our concept of plagiarism changes according to the mechanics of how jokes are spread. For example, vaudeville jokes recycled from town to town used to thrill early-twentieth-century audiences, but these routines died with the advent of television and movies. This specific form of plagiarism must have seemed socially acceptable in its time because it would have been difficult to catch, and originality wouldn\u2019t have mattered as much to a turn-of-the-century audience. Today, audiences are saturated with funny content, so we place a higher premium on originality.<\/p>\n

Oswalt wrote under the assumption that we\u2019ve reached the teleological ending-place of plagiarism. But his manifesto is full of references to the 1980s comedy scene, an era when stand-up started to become popular in comedy clubs and cross-country circuits. Today, up-and-coming comedians make their way through Twitter and Youtube, and their work can be shared worldwide. After any big news story, social media instantly fills with a plethora of similar short, snappy jokes. Unaccredited memes float from Reddit to Instagram to Facebook. In an age of infinite content, these one-liners are a dime a dozen. Comedians must adapt their work to reflect this change in technology, lest their sets be ruined by an audience who\u2019s already read their best material on Twitter. The increased proliferation of social media jokes has informed our cultural understanding of which jokes are original, and therefore, which jokes are funny. <\/span><\/p>\n

In Amy Schumer\u2019s case, Twitter and Youtube were both instrumental in bringing the controversy to light. As a response to the perceived slight, Pescatelli tweeted: <\/span>\u201cWhat has always been amazing to me is that she purports to be a feminist and yet only steals from other female comedians. If we call her on it we are \u201cjealous\u201d or career shamed. Be successful. WE want you to do well, just do it will [<\/span>sic<\/span><\/i>] your own material.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In return, Schumer implied on a SiriusXM Comedy show that Pescatelli targeted Schumer because of her success: \u201cPeople are afraid and angry at women, and they want to bring them down.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Pescatelli and Schumer\u2019s understandings of women\u2019s complex relationship with comedy has tilted the conversation away from specific comedic transgressions, and toward gender dynamics in comedy. Although it seems petty, their spat highlights an uncomfortable truth: the fact that Schumer and Pescatelli are women is relevant to questions of plagiarism, because comedians\u2019 genders affect the way people understand their jokes. Consider Schumer\u2019s \u201cstolen\u201d Patrice O\u2019Neal bit. (Be warned, it\u2019s pretty graphic.) <\/span><\/p>\n

When O\u2019Neal tells the joke, the punch line is at the tricked woman\u2019s expense. O\u2019Neal never explicitly purports to have committed the sex acts he describes, but the obvious fact that O\u2019Neal is male is essential to the experience. \u201cDo you ever \u2018Darth Vader\u2019 her?\u201d he asks. O\u2019Neal refers to the man in the joke as \u201cyou\u201d because he\u2019s speaking to an assumed male audience. Schumer, on the other hand, tells the joke from in the third person. The punchline falls on society; she ends the joke by emphatically calling \u201cThe Houdini,\u201d O\u2019Neal\u2019s \u201cPoltergeist,\u201d \u201cjust rape! No girl is going to think that\u2019s hilarious!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So even though some of the words and ideas are the same as O\u2019Neal\u2019s, and the joke could have benefitted from a brief \u201cI know Patrice O\u2019Neal used to do a bit about this,\u201d her audience, her female-ness, and the changing atmosphere in comedy alters the chemical makeup of the joke. She\u2019s moved the punchline\u2019s target away from the unsuspecting woman and onto society as a whole. The joke changes from how funny it is that women are exploitable to how funny it is that we don\u2019t notice when sexual assault is hidden in our seemingly innocent jokes. This isn\u2019t plagiarism, this is a cultural critique.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, some of the jokes Schumer has been accused of stealing seem impossible to defend, which is probably why she has yet to address them. A segment of her show blatantly mimics a MADtv segment. When white shoppers try to dance around the word \u201cblack\u201d to point out who helped them, MADtv\u2019s \u201cIf she had a favorite president, it would probably be Lincoln\u201d sounds an awful lot like Schumer\u2019s \u201cI would guess he probably voted for Obama.\u201d As the face of her television show, Schumer is responsible for her writers. It\u2019s not credible that no one in a group of about seventeen professional sketch writers realized the similarity to the MADtv sketch. Blame gets distributed across a group of people, but ultimately someone intentionally or unintentionally lifted this material.<\/span>
\nOriginality may feel like an absolute moral imperative, but plagiarism doesn\u2019t exist in a vacuum. Detecting joke theft in comedy is more than just checking to see if the punchlines match up word-for-word; to accuse someone of plagiarism is to examine their joke under a microscope for meaning and intent. It requires an understanding of both the mechanics of the joke, and the cultural context in which it exists. The evolving social media landscape, gender dynamics in humor, and writers\u2019 room ambiguity all factor into the final decision. In Schumer\u2019s case, some of her jokes are legitimately original, some seem like a bad case of parallel thinking, and some seem outright plagiarized. But digging through her material forces us to examine what it is about her jokes that made them funny in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Plagiarism plagues every creative field. In comedy, the rules are different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":544,"featured_media":1537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[265],"class_list":{"0":"post-1534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-art","8":"tag-plagiarism","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/544"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}