Can you copyright a joke? Probably not. A schtick, maybe – let’s face it, if you or I got onstage at open mike night and doused the audience with confetti, they’d immediately peg us as a Rip Taylor-wannabe and boo us off the stage. But jokes and funny stories are a different animal, altogether. (“But jokes and funny stories are a different animal.”)

Back in the days of vaudeville, comedians regularly used the same gags. At that time, a person who bought a ticket to a show in Peoria had no idea that the guy onstage was simply parroting the same jokes that other comedians were using in Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit. Milton Berle would later capitalize on this tactic; he was one of the first vaudevillians to host his own TV show, and he regularly made use of jokes and gags he’d absorbed from other Borscht Belt comics.  (Bob Hope once said that Uncle Miltie “never heard a joke he didn’t steal.”)

When Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show became the venue for aspiring comics, the stakes were raised. Because he had such a huge viewing audience, the public became aware of comedians and their routines, and local up-and-comers were quickly exposed as copycats when they “borrowed” material from professionals. Of course, there are still some struggling comics out there who still steal jokes and routines, but in most cases, it’s not worth the originator’s time and money to legally smack him down. It’s often more effective just to let the fans spread the word via the Internet that “Hey, I saw that same monologue on Saturday Night Live two years ago!”