Skip to main content


I love the idea of Joke Theft and shit on social media.

Someone makes a joke, and then someone else riffs on it. Or tells a similar joke. And people get super up in arms about the joke being "stolen".

Copyright and Clout just rotting their brain until they ignore the idea of culture

in reply to silverwizard

my use of the fediverse is the extent of my social media experience, so I'm not familiar with what you're referring to.

I remember people being up in arms about big name comedians in the early oughts stealing much of their material from unknown comics, and I (as a kid) was one of those.

I still somewhat stand by that, mostly because of the imbalance of power, but most of stand-up comedy is in the delivery.

Is this joke theft about memes?

in reply to Dial Tone, Busy Signal *biiip*

@Tony Bologna It's not really about memes.

I saw a post today where someone made a stupid joke along the lines of "I saw a programmer just typing into vi instead of using " and then a giant list of tools.

And someone else posted a screenshot of another similar joke and was like "if you steal a joke it's polite to credit the source".

And I get that comedians are selling jokes - and telling someone else's jokes has different consequences. But come on, we aren't getting paid here.

And I think the fact that a lot of social media people *are* getting paid for it, mixed amongst people who aren't makes it all pretty gross and weird.

in reply to silverwizard

I love how so often the "how dare you steal this joke" posts are about such low-hanging fruit, the most obvious riff a person could make about some current thing jokes. Maybe they saw that joke and reposted it, or maybe dozens of people came up with the same thing independently.
in reply to ⛅ w chance of bears

@⛅ w chance of bears Yeah

And like, maybe someone sees a joke, and would prefer a slightly better one and riffs.

you don't need to cite your Joke Sources

MLA Style Joke Citations