Nobody Steal This, But Sometimes People Tell The Same Joke

Media reporting icon Jim Romenesko looks briefly into the similarities between a gag employed by satirist Andy Borowitz and a cartoon created by Columbus Dispatch cartoonist Jeff Stahler. He notes that the paper's editor looked into it and concluded it was a coincidence. I can't imagine with the social media tools and instant access to the Internet out there right now, how far along we are in everyone trying to tell that first joke, that any cartoonist is going to do a gag related to any real-world circumstance that's completely original that a) isn't filtered through a set of unique characters, or b) completely demented and off the wall. At the same time, it really is easier to swipe jokes these days -- when this used to come up with strip cartoonists, there was always a bit of laugh about the idea of the cartoonist accessing whatever obscure source where the first gag appeared. The natural assumption -- usually true -- is that the cartoonist probably wasn't reading the First Methodist Church of Lancaster, California bulletin or whatever. But a searchable twitter feed? A cartoonist might stridently claim they pay no attention to them, and be totally honest in doing so, but you lose the logical presumption. I have to imagine this will have some effect down the line, maybe a kind of hesitance to get into certain areas or tell jokes a certain way, but I'm not sure what that will look like.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives