Abstract

Standup comedian Carlos Mencia has become infamous for his alleged joke-stealing. Outrage from the standup community, and a recent spate of legal arguments about copyright’s ability to protect comedians, have raised the issue of originality in standup comedy. These arguments about originality, however, all focus on literary originality—the originality of the joke. This essay places literary originality in relationship to performance originality, or the relative originality of comedians’ styles. A comedian’s style often defines her market share at least as much as her original content, yet most explorations of theft among comedians ignore style entirely. Style—consistent patterns of embodied practices—is just as vulnerable to theft as content. A number of legal cases suggest that style also can be protected from illicit appropriation, even though style is not, legally speaking, property. The law, in short, recognizes and protects style and content separately and equally, a distinction that also proves useful in theoretical considerations of literary originality and performance originality.

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