Do comedians steal jokes?

Comedians get accused of stealing jokes, but then they do just fine, with TV shows and movies and whatnot. What's the deal? Do they, or do they not? And if they do, does that mean nobody cares? Is there no Justice League of Funnymen to police this sort of thing?
—Rick, Los Angeles

The B!tch Replies:  Are you suggesting that Dane Cook may have stolen that hilarious gag about a guy getting hit by a car? Are you insinuating Dane couldn’t have found the innate humor in car accidents all by himself? 

Why so cynical? Who hurt you, baby?

We’ll get to joke stealing in a second. Meantime, a history: Many moons ago, before most of you were even blastocysts, there was a comedy police of sorts. The group rewarded honest and creative jokesters with national fame and made sure sticky-fingered hacks never made it past the Borscht Belt.

They were the talent scouts for The Tonight Show. Before Leno, The Tonight Show remained the only way any comedian could break big. Without the blessing of the late Johnny Carson, Ellen DeGeneres types remained unable to share their self-obsessed aw-shucks observations with a national audience. There were no YouTubes, no Lettermans, no Comedy Centrals, no other outlets for a middling comedian to find success.

And the Tonight Show people had standards. Dane Cook wouldn’t have made it so far as the NBC parking lot, no matter how vertical his hair was that day. This was the golden age of comedy—just moving around a lot onstage didn’t count as material.

Then came Letterman and Conan and American Idol —in short, gajillions of places where any clown could find an adoring audience of millions. As long as the performers brought in the ratings, no one much cared where Cook got that hilarious joke about the fan getting flattened by a car. Besides, Cook had that wicked hair, dudes!

No one cared—except, it seems, other comedians. Now, Websites abound with accusations. (Ping YouTube to see Joe Rogan wage a scorched-earth assault on Carlos Mencia in front of an audience that sort of cares. Another clip captures audio of George Lopez on Howard Stern's show, accusing Mencia of stealing Lopez’s material.)

How did political ethicist and View truth commissioner Rosie O'Donnell get her start? That's right, her teen self memorized a Seinfeld riff and performed it. Comics stealing gags? It's what they do, people! 

Why not take them to court for, say, violation of copyright? Because these are comedians. They spend what little money they have on sneakers and graphic tees in their eternal quest to look strategically disheveled.

“The burden is on the person suing,” explains Wesley Hyatt, a publicist at MMI Associates, as well as a TV historian with six books to his credit. “The easiest thing is to make their complaints known in public and move on.”

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