Another Week, Another New Yorker Caption Contest Plagiarism Accusation

Venerable cartooning institution The New Yorker has once again been accused of running a way-too-similar cartoon in its Caption Contest, this time a Paul Noth cartoon that looks a lot like a Jeff Darcy cartoon from two years ago in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. It's weird in that the obvious "no foul" responses come from two completely different angles. From one viewpoint, we're not exactly talking a rare and out-of-left-field idea here, and if each of us were to write down 10 ideas of how to do a joke about increasing corporate influence over doctors, I bet you'd see this joke on a lot of lists. From another way of looking at it, the staging is so similar you'd have to think that would have been changed if it were a pure copy job. It's always possible to memorize a gag and then forget it's not your own later on, too. We'll likely never know.
 
posted 8:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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