I Really Hate It When People Steal My Comedy

In 2003, I created "Whole Foods Lady," an extremely unenthusiastic checkout girl. When I performed her in my Second City review in 2010, people thought I STOLE the idea from HER. BUT I DEFINITELY didn't, and FURTHERMORE I heard that some SNL writers' aunts might have been  in town in the summer of 2005 when I played Whole Foods lady in a Harold show and may have possibly been in the audience. So, yeah. You draw your own conclusions.

The very first sketch I turned in to my Writing 1 class at Second City was about a young, female, body-conscious Indian doctor called The Bollywood Gyno. COINCIDENCE?!

I heard she has a bit about how much she can drink. Or something. I haven't seen it, but my friends told me, and I quote, "That's just like what you say!" Which is particularly interesting (inflammatory) when you see that Trainwreck (where she play a career-oriented magazine writer who is not interested in commitment but falls for the subject of her article--a dude connected to sports) was a DIRECT rip-off of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days which was A DIRECT RIP-OFF of a short treatment I wrote when I was fifteen.

Several minutes after I did "Drunk Virginia Woolf at BK Drive-Thru" in a showcase, Kimmi Davis did "Drunk Virginia Woolf at McD's Drive-Thru" in The SAME SHOWCASE. Now she's got a Comedy Central special.

I had it, basically, when I was born.

I don't have to prove to you the ideas were mine, because I wrote them here. So band together with ME against the aforementioned THIEVES.

Op Ed: One of my biggest fears as a comedian is not that I'll be ripped off, but instead that *I'll* accidentally or unintentionally rip something off...or just be accused of it. Part of it is a side effect of watching The Fugitive too many times in my formative years (building an intense fear of being accused of and punished for something I didn't do), and part of it is because "there is nothing new under the sun" and things get into the subconscious.

When we create, it's hard to separate what stuck in our brain because it was an observation we made--and what stuck because it was the entertaining end point to that observation. It all sloshes together in a well of interest we look to draw from. Truth is, one reason we like comedy is because it's relatable. Sometimes we all reach the same conclusions. (When it's positive, we call it "group mind.")

Don't misunderstand: I'm not defending people who steal material. In fact, people who intentionally steal and are aware of what they are doing are ASSHOLES and HACKS. But there's a gray area for sure, and I think jumping to an intense self-righteous conclusion is a sad side effect of this computer age. Strong immediate opinions are great in improvisation; they're unfair and dangerous in a world where someone's entire career can end because thousands of people read part of a headline and make a judgment.

What would've happened to Harrison Ford if Tommy Lee Jones was a bunch of faceless people who only saw half a flashback of him fighting with his wife?! He would've been fried and the one armed man would've gotten away with murder (not the perfect metaphor, but that makes me pretty confident it hasn't been used before). I choose to give my fellow creators the benefit of the doubt.

 

Andel Sudik has been performing and teaching improvisation for over 10 years. She is an alum of The Second City in Chicago and Amsterdam's Boom Chicago and loves to play at iO. Check her out on Twitter @AndelSudik or on her website www.yesandel.com.