A Couple More Things on That Joke-Stealing Guy
Friday, April 30, 2010
- I realized immediately after posting, but too quick to get ahead of RSS, that professional cover bands have to pay licensing fees–either to the club or some other licensing agency. So there’s that bit of clarification.
- The one thing I can’t stop thinking is how did this end up on Youtube? Think about it: this guy’s savvy enough that he’s not repurposing Jeff Dunham or Carlos Mencia, but real live good comics who are smart and not necessarily the most mainstream. He’s clearly got taste (which Gabe mentioned in his Videogum post), which means there’s a motagem of intelligence there. But it just seems completely illogical to me that he wouldn’t be more savvy about this stuff being videotaped and ending up on the Web. Apparently, this was all done by a guy named Andrew King, a local comedian who opened for this guy and posted the videos at Patton Oswalt’s request.
- Not that I’m saying this Madson guy’s created the world’s weirdest hoax, or that he’s some super amazingly subversive Andy Kaufman-type, and maybe I’m just naive, but it seems to me that no one who likes this sort of “smart” comedy could be this idiotic and this clueless. I just feel like there’s got to be something more to this. Maybe there’s not.
- Again, the thing I’m most interested in here is the ethics of stand-up comedy w/r/t “stealing.” Again, as something to think with, in particular by bouncing it off the same ideas as applied to music. Specifically, the idea that indie bands often play covers without citing their source, and they’re not called plagiarists. Often, audience members who aren’t deep into the bands’ catalogs themselves feel dumb for not knowing the material–they place the onus on themselves for not knowing, not the bands for trying to fool them, or claim the songs as their own.
- This is a larger way of asking about the ideas of “plagiarism,” “repurposing,” “sampling,” “covering,” etc. as cultural categories, not simply catch-all terms to be generically applied to acts like this. And a larger way of learning more about what stand-up comics do, how they create their material, what personal investments they have in it–that make someone like Nick Madson into the worst fucking asshole in the world.
- And at the same time, how bands can “get away” with playing uncited cover versions. Is it as simple as bands making something new of the work, while this guy’s clearly not doing anything to change the original material? Subquestion (maybe the most important question): can Patton Oswalt-style comedy be “covered” at all, without being “plagiarized”? What is it about stand-up that makes it impossible to cover, if so? Is it the same sense of ownership and personality that makes rap songs so tough to cover effectively?
Filed under: Patton Oswalt stand-up comedy