A small storm has been raging in the comedy world after the Feb. 10th incident between Joe Rogan of NBC’s Fear Factor and comedian Carlos Mencia. Rogan is getting attention with strong worded accusations that Mencia steals much of his successful and lucrative material. This type of tumult is nothing new in an industry that operates virtually beyond the protection of copyright laws.
Comedians, for the most part, cling to their material and react emotionally to its unauthorized re-use, but the act of stealing artistic material is a long standing human tradition. Beyond comedy, all art forms utilize appropriation, as it is called politely, to recreate and reinvigorate old ideas. All art uses appropriation in one form or other. To draw from nature, as Leonardo did, is to essentially steal an image from the world.
The greatest of creative geniuses have all been frauds to some extent. The most famous love story of all time, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette, was an unoriginal story, being based on an older poem about the exploits of Tristan and Isolde. Picasso, possibly the most powerful and inspirational painter in two thousand years, is noted to have gained influence for his cubist style from his visits to Africa and exposure to their artistic culture.
All of this was placed center stage during the age of Andy Warhol as outright copies of soap boxes and soup cans crowded the minds of the great artistic thinkers. Warhol offered us an almost quantum-mechanical view of art and the creative process, one where observation held a vital role in creating the nature of that which was being observed. In this slightly extremist viewpoint, theft is impossible, since any re-creation will unavoidably be altered by the context of its retelling.
Literary material, like artistic images, is recycled persistently and endlessly. As the wise King Solomon was once rumored to have said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Author Dan Brown, of the smash occult hit The Da Vinci Code, is accused of stealing his best-selling plotline from the late Robert Anton Wilson, whose dozens of books explore Illuminati and Gnostic mysteries surprisingly similar to Brown’s.
In the comedy world, theft is a repetitive accusation, and one which has felled few great comics. Robin Williams is apparently notorious in comedic circles as a wholesale vulture of others’ material. Comedians were once noted to end their routines and walk of stage when Williams would enter a club. Dennis Leary had been lambasted for stealing various cigarette and drug routines from the late Bill Hicks, while Bill and Dennis are both accused of stealing material from the legendary Lenny Bruce.
It’s in the nature of a joke to be retold. While our modern mass-media system has created a world that epitomizes individual creativity, the legacy of our human oral tradition continues to thrive. In the act of re-telling a joke, one cannot help but punctuate certain parts, extend others, and add ones own personal inflection to the telling. In this way, jokes and stories have rolled across civilization for thousands of years.
There is also the synchronistic nature of comedy to consider. For a wonderful example of comedic synchronicity, visit Daryl Cagle’s daily political cartoons page on msn.com. If you read every cartoon for a particular day, you will notice abject similarities between certain cartoons. On the first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq for example, at least six cartoonists, completely independent of each other, drew cartoons featuring a birthday cake with a single stick of dynamite placed festively on top.
Carlos Mencia is as brilliant as he is bigoted and as offensive as he is endearing. His racially charged jokes and stubborn, unapologetic style have endeared a large fan-base and a strong opposition. Visionary or exploitative jerk; Genius or fraud, Carlos Mencia carries the immeasurable energy necessary to engage his audience and sell even the most wrong-headed joke. In this way, he remains a truly great comedian.
