Radio and TV brought more joke swiping. Mr. Television, Milton Berle, was so famous for borrowing material that he was known as the Thief of Bad Gags. Berle had no shame, so brazen that he often joked about stealing material in his act.
NBC
At least in some comedy circles, stand-ups thought it was OK to take a crazy-quilt approach to plagiarism — no problem if you just took a little here and another little something there.
“I was doing everybody’s material,” says 1950s comic Norm Crosby. “I would watch Ed Sullivan on a Sunday and I would take a joke or a gag or a line from… Buddy Hackett, Jan Murray, and Red Buttons. I took just a thought, an idea, a gag, a line, just something—not stealing really. Because when you have no writers, no knowledge of writers, and no material of your own, you know, it was okay to do that.”
Not stealing. Really, Norm?
Ed Sullivan Show
Some say it depends on how you do it. Comedian David Steinberg describes a more benign version. “There’s no good comedian that hasn’t stolen ideas from someone,” he says. “And you don’t really ’steal’ material. You do your own version of it.” He uses the example of Shelley Berman doing a routine as if he’s talking on the phone to someone unseen, a device also used over the years by Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin, and Ellen Degeneres.
Well, yeah, but let’s be clear. That form of ‘theft’ — taking a general format and putting a personal stamp on it — isn’t quite the same thing as lifting jokes in their entirety, Norm Crosby-style.
A “tendency to absorb material”
The list of more contemporary comics accused of (or in many cases, admitting to) stealing jokes could take up an entire wing in the Stand-Up Comedy Hall of Fame: Woody Allen, Richard (“I made a lot of money as Bill Cosby”) Pryor, the afore-mentioned Amy Schumer, Trevor Noah, George Carlin, Dane Cook, and the Wayans brothers, to name a few.
HBO
Joke Thieves: A History And Analysis
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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