Research Your Punchlines

Just because you thought of it, doesn’t mean it’s yours to develop. Search Google by placing your punchlines in quotations and searching. Check r/jokes while you’re at it. If there isn’t a similar joke, test it at the next mic and ask other comics if they have heard something similar, then post it on social media to mark the date… even if you only do so privately. This can come in handy if it turns out someone else tells your joke because you can quickly confirm that you wrote it a long time ago. Always confirm and offer to compare proof of concept before you accuse someone of theft… its a serious matter. If you ask other comedians whether or not they’ve heard them do anything similar, do so in a non-accusatory way. If however you have irrefutable proof that someone is telling lifted material, you should speak out about it. Ask traveling road comics if they know them and if they’ve heard them tell the joke before they encountered you perform it. Even an “original” joke may not be entirely novel. If a joke is a mad lib of another it’s already a little hack and you should consider rewriting it. If you want to take a step further to protect your material, have it printed on a shirt or other merch to establish a basic trademark. If someone 100% steals your joke or uses lifted material, simply get proof and write them a cease and desist

Cool Story Bro. I was a green comic on the patio of a hole in the wall open mic in a Denver bicycle cafe when I hear two comics getting into it over a “stolen” premise. The joke went something like “individual people are good but groups of people are evil” i.e. individuals are the nicest thing on the planet but put those same people in a group and they become capable of terrible things. I was a somewhat new comic at this point but I know my history and I definitely know my Carlin. So I tell them (before they rip each others throats out) that they should google George Carlin and then for context, the story of Tesla and Marconi’s great radio controversy. A period of time when two geniuses took Hertz’s discovery of radio emissions and transformed them into radio as we know it today. The problem was they both did so independently and at nearly the exact same time. So maybe, JUST maybe if two people can invent telecommunications at the same time, its possible two comedians wrote the same premise Carlin already did 40 years ago and even he ripped off Carl Sagan’s barber shop mirror infinite regress from PBS’s Cosmos series.

You get it yet?! You and every other comedians will 100% rip off another artist in some capacity without realizing it and the only way to keep it out of your set is to meticulously vet your material.

Rewrite all your jokes and try a find more novel approaches to them. There is no “right way” to do comedy, only many wrong ways, and the sooner you find every “right” way to navigate your material, the sooner you will have something you can be proud of. Studying your own comedy is just as important as performing it, if you want to be a professional.