Never Lift Material
NEVER copy (lift) material. Not from the internet, TV, movies, or other people.
Vet material. Sharing a premise is one thing, punchlines are quite another. Even if another comic gives you a tag… how do you know it was their’s to give? Even unintentionally stealing material is highly problematic. Especially to you because everything is on the internet. So if you lift jokes, someone will 100% find out and make you look silly. Careers can get trainwrecked over the theft of jokes. (Carlos Mencia, Dane Cook, etc)
When you think about it, joke theft is in effect a form of cannibalism. By accepting it, everyone becomes a potential victim of someone telling their joke to a larger outlet. It enables less funny people to be more successful than the truly gifted which makes the industry that much more deprived of talent.
Prevent bad habits before they start. Try NOT to watch “too much” stand-up and NEVER fall asleep to comedy on YouTube. Jokes can rub off and cause kleptonesia, where you think an idea is original but in truth its a fragment of memory. If you wake up with an idea for a joke after falling asleep to YouTube, double check your watch list and make damn sure you didn’t lift from someone’s HBO special or just save yourself some time and only watch comedy intentionally. As in focus on it and study it, or don’t put it on at all. I’ve seen comedians talking outside an open mic unintentionally repeat a joke that happened on the curb 10 minutes before they went on because they were only half listening and subconsciously decide to “improv” a bit after a default joke didn’t land. Do yourself a favor and take a break from listening to comedy in the car, shower, bed, or any other time you can’t give it your FULL focus. Otherwise you invite the possibility of lifting material and not even realizing it.
On the other side of the fence it’s even more tricky. Afterall you can’t see people’s thoughts. So you have to boil it down with a process of deductive logic to assess the likelihood and implications of whether or not someone lifted. In general it’s more acceptable to steal a premise than it is a punchline… and far less noticeable as a result. For example “airplane food” is a throwaway premise and well within the realm of hack. So you might say the closer a joke is to being hack, the less someone would even care IF it was lifted… because it was bad to being with. You’ll see this with “I look Like” jokes. Every comic has them. They Are tired and lame… but as effective and timeless as an unexpected pie in the face. No comic in their right mind would ever accuse another of stealing their “I look like” premise. The idea is so laughable that you could write a sketch that ended with accusing someone of stealing their whole “guy going through a divorce” premise. While original premises are BEST. You’ll probably find it difficult at first to write believable ones AND equally difficult to base them on real life without losing the audience to boredom. I’ll talk more about how to avoid that in a later chapter but for now let’s talk about punchlines.
Punchlines are sacred. If you steal a punchline, you’re dead to me and most working comics out there. Never do it. Never reverse engineer someone else’s joke. Even if you think its “better” the way you wrote or perform it. Just DON’T. No amount of unearned applause and laughter is going to be worth the ramifications. Just wait until you hear someone steal a joke (and if you do this long enough you 100% will). When you do, its not going to be you throwaway jokes either. It’s going to be the good stuff and the feeling of betrayal and horror is not unlike seeing your true love get ravaged by a marauding doomsday biker, and if there’s a clique of comics to gaslight you and tell people the joke was never yours. its like a gang of those bikers circling your entire family. So, if/when you find yourself listening to your jokes come out of someones else’s mouth, take a breath and ask yourself the following question…
1) Is getting kicked out of a venue and/or ostracized worth swinging on a MFer? Nope, revenge is a dish best served cold.
2) Did they steal a premise? A Punchline? Both?!?!?! If it’s both then you have every right to confront them gracefully.
3) Ask yourself the question could have been parallel thinking? Was the joke about something in the news? Was it a throw away joke?
4) Did they get a bigger laugh than you get? If so they likely didn’t steal it and you’ll probably want to scrape the bit either way. You choice.
5) Did they get a weaker laugh because they left out key punchlines or callbacks that don’t fit the rest of their set? If so, you might need to confront them.
6) Do the other comics look at you when they say or even start the joke? When even OTHER comics notice… it should be addressed by ALL the comics.
Usually if someone is stealing your joke, the act of calling them out is enough, but for their ego is too great. For these shitheels you’ll need to leverage that ego’s fears to get them to stop. Just tell your joke at the same mic but undeniably better making it abundantly clear who wrote it. I’ve even set up a camera for a side by side of my Willy Wonka Plantation Owner bit and sent a thief the video afterward complete with notes on all of my punchlines they’re leaving out and when AND a video of them in the background of the place where they first heard me tell the bit the night before they lifted it, denied ever hearing my bit, and had other comics “vouch” that he had told the “little people powered paddle boat ride” which he had to change to the “m” word due to his accent. It was super passive aggressive I’ll admit, but just knowing that someone had proof and if they continued would 100% expose them for being a thief (and their friends’ liars) was enough. Not only to deterrent the behavior again in the future, but that guy (a scene rat of 5 years actually quit comedy the same month. I’m guessing my jokes weren’t the only stolen ones on the videos but it was never meant to be blackmail. Just the writing on the wall that he and his clique desperately wished they could erase. So remember, if joke theft is a plague, cameras are the cure. Don’t be a thief AND protect yourself from them by recording EVERY piece of material you test and every joke you write with a timestamp.