Unusually for a comedian, Stewart Lee has, for some years, devoted a corner of his website to reporting apparent acts of plagiarism among comedians. After I first encountered it, I became irked by the lack of attribution in comedy generally.
Leafing through a book about Tommy Cooper some time ago, I learned that many of his jokes were based upon ones he’d bought from a joke service, and that Cooper had compiled detailed collections of others’ jokes, from which he distilled much of the banter in his act. Importantly, if he was paying for the right to use these jokes, then he wasn’t plagiarising them; but it was still disappointing to learn that many of the jokes I’d known him for might not, in fact, have been his.
My understanding is that one of Lee’s aims, in creating his Plagiarist’s Corner
, was to bring to public attention the derivative nature of comedy: to make people ask themselves how important originality is in a comedian. It prompted me to ask myself: would it ruin comedy if performances had to come with lists of references, like academic papers? Or would it benefit comedy, by affording the original writers a fairer share of the limelight?
I was reminded of these considerations on Monday, when my friend Andrew O’Neill spotted a YouTube video of someone called Tom Hosker appearing to perform parts of his (Andrew’s) act essentially verbatim, and again this evening when I watched The Letter, a 1982 sketch from the Cambridge Footlights starring Stephen Fry, which contains a very similar conceit to the Woody Allen short story Count Dracula from 1971. Perhaps Fry’s sketch was written in innocence; perhaps Tom Hosker thought he could, like other stand-ups, get away with using someone else’s material without giving them credit; perhaps Hosker did give credit, but I either missed that segment or he gave it off-camera.
Perhaps, like folk songs termed standards
or traditionals
, the attribution should be considered less important than the piece, and the latter should become common property. There’s a wide range of moral positions available, and to make sense of them, comedy must be seen as just one form (or perhaps a subset of forms) of the creative endeavours to which the wider intellectual property debate pertains. I’m still in the process of drawing my conclusions, but in the meantime, I’m glad of Stewart Lee’s thought-provoking little corner, for improving the likelihood of those conclusions emerging well-informed.