They’d call me STEALy Dan if my name was Dan and I stole jokes

From Who Cares About Joke Stealing? by Jesse David Fox (for Splitsider):

The most apparent explanation is that it’s moral matter — stealing is supposedly wrong. It’s undeniable that a comedian taking the joke of another comedian is bad, especially if it’s an entire routine; however, considering how much we celebrate art thieves and Danny Ocean’s eleven sticky-fingered friends, it does seem to miss at least part of the picture. If the Internet hated real thieves as much as it did jokes thieves, YouTube would be littered with surveillance camera videos. Maybe it has less to do with the comedian who wrote the joke and the comedian who supposedly stole it, and more to do with the fans themselves.

I urge you to read the article in full. It does hit upon a pretty salient point, which is that people on the internet are way too eager to tear someone down as a “thief” simply for having a similar joke. When I was younger I was all over Dane Cook for “stealing” jokes, but in retrospect, a lot of this stuff is pretty easily surmised and I bet a dozen or more comics have written similar material completely ignorant of its prior existence. Hell, I’m sure I have and most comedians reading this have or will as well.

I am, to my detriment, conscious of this. If a joke or a bit comes to me too easily, I’m reticent to even test it out. I always suspect that if it came to me that easily or was that obvious, then someone else must have done it. I’m probably worse off for doing it and it’s likely rooted more in the unnecessary guilt bred into me by generations of Irish Catholics than it is in any real possibility that the joke I just wrote is similar to someone else’s.

On the other hand, theft of material is a very real thing. You hear stories all the time, and one need only listen to the two-part exploration and interviews with Carlos Mencia on Marc Maron’s “WTF Podcast” to know that they’re out there.

I’m a pup in this game and even I’ve experienced it. A comic went up and opened with a bit that I had been opening with for weeks. My heart sank and I felt myself turn red. I wasn’t angry; rather, I wanted to cry out in frustration. What could I do? I’d done the bit probably in front of all of a few dozen people, and being so new, I didn’t feel I was in a position to address it. It’s almost bullying, though I don’t even know if the comic in question was even conscious of it or it was just an accident that occurred from a combination of riffing and osmosis.

The point is, though, that it’s a thing that really does happen and, yes, people on the internet act as vigilantes and overreact. See also: everything else on the internet. But this piece sort of poo-poos the fact that it’s a very real problem by providing anecdotes where the “theft” was likely incidental and unintentional and not acknowledging, or at least not acknowledging enough, the very real theft of material that occurs in the community. It is, in a very real way, akin to plagiarism, except in most cases we as comics have little to no recourse and usually don’t find out until it’s too late. And yeah, people on the internet suck, but those situations and the feeling it instills in those who are victims of it sucks a LOT more.