Tony Cowards
Wednesday 30th March 2011 2:24pm
Wiltshire
1,762 posts
Quote: Aldeem @ March 30 2011, 2:39 PM BST
Did you see my message to you last week Tony re win100?Someone had used the same punchline you use in a joke, namely "She's a keeper", but had a different front end. Guess it's like my 'how I roll' effort, just coincidence taking a stock phrase and trying to build a joke working back from it, rather than plagiarism.
Yes thanks, as you say though most cases of "joke theft" are completely coincidental because of the way jokes are back engineered.
In the case of my "she's a keeper" joke, Tim Vine once told me that he'd tried a similar joke but rather than being about someone who worked in a zoo in his version they were a goalkeeper, he told me that he could never get his version to work consistently so he'd dropped it and he complimented me on my version (one of my proudest moments in comedy!).
For the one-liner comic Twitter is both a boon and a pain in the derriere, it's a boon because it has made me become a prolific writer and has helped me to learn how to write efficiently, but it's a pain because you do lose jokes to the twittersphere, people (mainly non-comics) "pinch" the jokes (and usually not in a malicious way) and before you know it they are being texted to hundreds or thousands of people (this has happened to me a few times) as well as being used as Facebook statuses and spread on Twitter itself.