Thursday 22 July 2010

Joke joke

There's an interesting article on the BBC about whether comedians should be allowed to copyright their own material.

The comedian Dan Antopolski had to confront this dilemma after one of his one-liners won the best joke award at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Soon after the gag - "Hedgehogs: why can't they just share the hedge?" - was given the accolade, it went viral across the internet.

But quickly, he realised he would have to drop the routine from his set - because his audiences had already heard it, and some might even assume that Antopolski had plagiarised the gag himself... "The thing with jokes is that once audiences have heard them, they're no longer funny," he says.


Not true - or else people would laugh before a comedian tells a joke rather than afterwards.

5 comments:

Bill Quango MP said...

or else people would laugh before a comedian tells a joke rather than afterwards.

I don't get it?

dearieme said...

Come on, BQ: "once audiences have heard them, they're no longer funny".

Mark Wadsworth said...

BQ, that was a rubbish heckle. I was waiting for somebody to say "Mark, that joke was quite funny until you actually told it." to which I would retort "That heckle was quite funny until you actually said it." and so on ad infinitum.

D, ta for back up.

Anonymous said...

People laugh when told to - that is why they hold prompt boards up to the audience on american TV.
and Shakespeare said something along those lines in Hamlet as well

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