Here’s a thing I wrote for the Jewish Quarterly.

Future Rabbi?

Congratulate me. I’ve just written a whole sheet of A4 by pen. After years of computercentricity it felt weird, foreign, as unwelcome a throwback to the 1980s as news that The Tweets have reformed so we can hear the “Birdie Song” live again (ah, “The Tweets”. Now there’s a name that finally has meaning in this social network age). As I heaved the pen clumsily across the paper, sweat pouring from my brow, Repetitive Strain Injury gathering in my freaked-out forearm, I felt like a man trying to plough a field with a… well, with a pen. And after all that intense manual labour, the words were about as legible as if they’d been written by a three year old. With his foot. Where were the clear curves and confident uprights of Times New Roman or Arial, the font which, as every Disney fan knows, gained its elegant look by sacrificing its voice to Ursula the Sea Witch? I couldn’t work out how to cut-and-paste, couldn’t make any of the words bold – writing with a pen and paper is rubbish.

Give me a couple more months and I’ll say the same about books. Jews may be known as the People of the Book but as far as I’m concerned we can already be rechristened (sorry, bad choice of words) the People of the Kindle. I’ve only had my e-reader a few weeks and I’m already cured of my nostalgia for the smell of a new book, the look of its cover, the physicality of turning the pages (which now seems almost as tough a form of manual labour as using a pen). I like that no-one on the tube can tell I’m reading Katie Price’s “Being Jordan” for the 4^th time (I hate missing the nuances and subtext). And why tell people you’re halfway through a book when you can tell them you’re 46% of the way through (Kindle virgins – there’s a little bar at the bottom of the screen that offers you this detail). I confidently predict that within five years even Torah scrolls will be in electronic tablet form and therefore so much easier to lift.

My writing style also betrays how I’ve evolved into a man who spends his whole life tapping at a computer (homo tapiens? Presuming you rhyme “sap-“ with “tap”). Too much texting and social networking have eliminated pronouns from the start of my sentences, and as for the verbs “to be” and “to have”, forget it. Fairly confident that irritates lots of people. Seen them banging on about it loads. Then there’s the informality of my email sign-offs. It’s always “best” or – heaven help me – “bestest”, from “Dave x” or “Dx”, even – and what a terrible slip of the keyboard that “x” was – when writing to the Chief Rabbi.

At least my writings aren’t littered with LOL’s and OMG’s (or, for the orthodox Jew, OMG-d’s). I’m over 40 so it would contravene the 1995 Act Your Age Act, but I can see the appeal. LOLs and smiley faces don’t half help clarify what you’re thinking – Kafka would be so much more understandable if “Metamorphosis” had begun “One day Gregor Samsa woke up to find he’d been turned into a huge beetle LOL”. Still I’m unable to resist the asterisk. Once confined to walk-on roles for footnotes and the occasional expletive, the asterisk has clearly got a new agent. It’s now constantly in work on the internet: to stress a word you *really* want to pick out or to express the feelings of the writer about his own sentence *wonders if he needs to give an example*.

I’ve got to the stage when it’s a struggle not to use asterisks and other internetisms when writing an article like this. The other day I even used *facepalm* in conversation (it’s internet for finding something so stupid you want to slap your forehead with your hand; see also *facedesk*). I was talking to an aunt with dementia at the time so the expression was never going to fly. What am I like *facepalm*?! But that’s homo tapiens for you. It may frustrate the peddants (spell it with two d’s, it really annoys them) but it’s surely only a matter of time before asterisks and LOL-style acronyms (Lolcronyms?) enter formal written text and our prayer books are full of “Blessed are you, OMG, who has created the fruit of the vine smiley face”.

Dx *hits send**takes rest of the day off*

Futureman. Is that a Jewish name? is a post from: David Schneider's website

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5 Terms in English Slang Everyone Should Know is a post from: David Schneider's website

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Jordward. At one point everyone was trying to get in with the twins.

You have to hand it to Simon Cowell. In a bid to outwit the campaign against an X-Factor Christmas No.1, he’s announced that this year’s winner’s song will be a version of “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine. Thus he wins.

Of course that’s not true. Though fans of Rage Against the Machine will tell you that the new line-up of Leona Lewis, Jedward and that old man who did some breakdancing on “Britain’s Got Talent” has been a disappointment. I totally understand the rage against the X-Factor machine. It’s agony to know that a constituency of knee-jerking automaton fans will buy a record, however crap, and get it to number 1 at Christmas. Still, it worked for Cliff Richard.

And that’s slightly my point. This is nothing new. It’s just that now, like that monkey that Jeff Goldblum turned inside out in “The Fly”, we can see the innards, the mechanics of the music biz, or at least the ones we’re allowed to see:  the process of selecting a plastic star, the A&R man (Simon Cowell), the ruthlessness.

But it’s one of the great things about X-Factor that the monkey guts are out there. It’s like democracy in miniature, complete with all the manipulations and flaws and spin and sham. At the next general election, Johnathan and David Dimbleby will no doubt be known as Javid, and if no party gets an overall majority it will go to Deadlock, with the Queen probably bottling it and putting it to the public vote. The Jedward phenomenon is like an experiment in what would happen if the Science Fiction Loony Party got enough votes to really threaten the system.

Personally, I didn’t like the twins. They shouldn’t have been there. We have to remember that women threw themselves under horses for the right to vote on the X-Factor. But as a true free-speech liberal, I may not approve of how they sing but I will fight tooth and nail for their right to sing like that. Except with the Wham one. That was awful.

You could have a field day analysing what we can learn about democracy and voter intentions from protest votes in reality shows. We should ask a political correspondent – John Sergeant, perhaps. Ultimately, though, the people saw Jedward off. That’s the great thing about reality TV. It reassures me that, in the end, the great British public are honest, unprejudiced rewarders of talent, decency and good teeth. Democracy works.

Even in the 50s, Xfactor brought families together

I’m an X-factor fan (there, I’ve said it!). I know it’s massively flawed, especially the new format where the first half of the results show has nothing to do with the competition (though I did enjoy that woman last week who was one of the best Michael Jackson impersonators I’ve ever seen. Janet Something). But at a time where viewing habits are so split, it’s good to have something that unites us whether we hate it or love it or just want to slag off the strange black meringues Dannii calls her hairdo for that week.

Don’t get me wrong, I want Rage Against the Machine to get to number 1. It would make a vital statement about democracy, the power of subversion, and the resistance to a cultural hegemony imposed upon us by the Big Business. Then again, that Joe Mcelderry has got such a cute smile.

Thanks to @stanandollie for the pics.

X(mas)-Factor is a post from: David Schneider's website

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Marcus Brigstocke. He's mentioned in this article

Here’s a thing I just wrote for the Sunday Times. For a list of nicked jokes (allegedly) and some interesting youtubery, click here:

Stand-up comedians abhor the same crimes as everyone else: murder, assault, the fact that John and Edward are still in the X-Factor. But if there’s one crime that riles them above all others, it’s joke theft. The latest victim of comedic light-fingers is stand-up comic Gary Delaney. He’d noticed that several of his previously sure-fire gags were floundering as badly as Gordon Brown in the polls. A quick check on Google revealed that 34 of his jokes had been posted uncredited on the website Sickipedia.org, a sort of virtual multi-storey car-park for un-PC one-liners and dodgy gags.

Now this may not seem like a big deal, but for a comedian – and I am one – jokes are our babies (though we are allowed to have real ones too). It was as if some internet Madonna had come to Gary Delaney’s village and taken 34 of his children away for adoption.

I know how he feels. I once had a routine ripped off on an amateur talent show on TV. I was furious at first, though soon my ego kicked in and I wondered if it got any laughs. I was strangely pleased it did. That’s not everyone’s reaction. More typical is the fight I witnessed several years ago between two comedians about who came up with a gag about panto star Frank Bruno’s latest boxing match where the spectators all shouted “he’s behind you!”. Somehow it felt right having fisticuffs over Frank.

Plagiarism was never an issue on the mainstream circuit of old. Never Mind the Buzzcocks star Phill Jupitus remembers doing a gig with Little and Large: “Bernard Manning came into the room and said to Eddie Large: ‘That Princess Diana joke of yours is going really well. I’m using it every f**king night’. Eddie just shrugged and said ‘Alright, Bernard’”. That’s not an attitude you’d find on what used to be known as the alternative circuit. There, the joke thief is a pariah, though often a pariah who does really well. American comic Denis Leary is hated by many in the comedy community for allegedly stealing from Bill Hicks, whilst Robbie Williams was recently turned on for (again, allegedly) using comedian Jack Whitehall’s gag about him feeling that somewhere his Dad’s looking down on him – he’s not dead,  just very condescending.

But nowadays it’s not just fellow comics we have to beware of. It’s everyone – thanks to the internet. Earlier this year, in a fit of stage-rage, Lee Hurst, the cheery cockney comic from They Think It’s All Over, cheerily smashed the mobile phone of a punter he thought was filming him for youtube, concerned it would allow people to rip off his material. But Hurst would be the first to admit that the only website he’s likely to look at is Luddite.com. Fellow comedian Marcus Brigstocke is more typical. He has no problems if his TV or radio work ends up on the internet: “I’m always flattered. It’s very clear that it’s me who wrote it, it’s me who’s doing it and it makes people want to see my shows”.

The problem occurs when it’s not made clear who wrote it. A few years ago one-liner virtuoso Tim Vine had 20 of his jokes pasted in an email and spread across the net claiming to be jokes used by Tommy Cooper. Some people refused to believe the material was Vine’s, even though the fraudulent emailer helpfully left the punchline to one gag as “Mr Vine, get out of the filing cabinet”. I suspect he or she does not work in espionage.

Gary Delaney posted one of his jokes – “Old Macdonald had Tourettes: E, I, E, I, C**t” – on Twitter only to see it re-posted by Lily Allen without

Lily Allen. Whose side are you on?

crediting him. Before posting it, Delaney did a Google search to make sure the joke hadn’t been done. It now yields 167,000 (uncredited) search results on Google. It must hurt to see your baby being so damn promiscuous.

Marcus Brigstocke had a similar experience with a joke about the computer game Pac-Man: “If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music”. The joke went viral, appeared on tee-shirts and was even credited to Bill Gates. Brigstocke is philosophical about his joke’s crazy bid for freedom: “I kind of let it go. In any case, my guess is my legal team will be fractionally smaller than Bill Gates’”.

But why is it so important to us to be credited? We’re comedians so why the sense of humour failure? Shouldn’t we be flattered by the success of our gags? Tim Vine, though keen not to whinge, doesn’t hold with this: “You wouldn’t say: Ooh! That burglar must have really loved your DVD player to have nicked it!”. The real problem is – and this is where I suspect I may lose some sympathy – it takes a lot of work to make a good joke. I know it’s not work as in 7-year-old-child-down-an-Angolan-tin-mine work and I also know some jokes just pop out spontaneously. You can see this on Twitter whenever a celebrity death takes place (I remember being so impressed when TV Burp writer Daniel Maier posted  “Dead Man Moonwalking” within seconds of Michael Jackson’s death).

But more often than not the birth of a joke is a long, painful process, without gas-and-air or epidural. I once posted this on Twitter: “UK for Dummies: There are 2 Browns. Derren and Gordon. One gets everything right, the other gets everything wrong”. I agonised over the punctuation for at least half an hour before posting: colon? Full stop? I just couldn’t decide. But that’s our job. We sit in a damp room with one halogen light bulb that needs replacing (just me?) and try to think up funnies. We try them out in front of an audience, we hone and polish them. We love our jokes. We’ve watched them grow. We would willingly give a false address to get them into a better school.  Which is why we hate it when they go and call someone else Daddy.

The problem is sometimes it’s hard to prove paternity. Last month the comedian Josie Long ran into trouble when she performed her joke about the cost of taking part in sport at Hogwarts being a quid each: “I did the joke and people shouted ‘Adam and Joe!’”. It turned out a member of the public from Australia had passed off the joke as their own on Adam and Joe’s Radio 6 show. The alleged joke thief, one James Hewitt (not, I think, the one who dated Princess Diana) was adamant he’d made it up himself. He’d never even heard of Josie Long.

It’s almost impossible to know for sure that a joke you’ve come up with is one no-one else has ever thought of. This is especially true of topical gags. They’re jokes that you grab and forge quickly and the chances are others are having similar ideas. I once wrote on Twitter: “one thing you can say for gender-vague athlete Castor Semenya – at least she had the balls to compete”. I got an irate reply from two Twitter users who’d posted pretty much the same gags a few minutes earlier. I hadn’t seen them – honest – but the fear of accidentally stealing a joke is so intense I spent about 2 months apologising.

And it’s not just topical jokes. Phill Jupitus once saw one of the most succesful comedians in the world perform a major routine he’d done about lions and antelopes: “when I saw it I almost burst into tears. It meant I wouldn’t be able to tour or do a live video that autumn”. His fury only abated some years later when a friend showed him a Richard Pryor video from way back in 1972 with the same lions and antelopes routine. Some might say that’s proof there are no new jokes. Though I suspect Richard Pryor never did a routine about Swine flu or whether anatomist Gunther von Hagens allows you to keep your skin on during sex.

Richard Pryor: Joke thief with a time machine?

One-line merchants like Jimmy Carr, Tim Vine and Gary Delaney will always suffer more from plagiarism than other comics because their jokes are so portable. Comics who tell stories or have a distinctive stage persona like Eddie Izzard or Lee Evans are far less vulnerable. The secret, according to Phill Jupitus, is to be unique so they can’t steal from you: “That’s what comics should think about: it’s not the jokes, it’s about themselves. It’s about your personality. They can’t appropriate ‘you’”.

So maybe we should all just chill about this joke ownership thing. So what if it’s our living? We can always just go write another joke. As Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take things to”. But then what did he know about comedy? – Oh, and that quote was told me by comedian Peter Serafinowicz. It’s important to make that clear.

This article first appeared in the Sunday Times.

See also my Bill Hicks vs David Hare post

For more about this see Jay Richardson’s article on the Chortle website (he’s @jayirichardson on Twitter). I think I should also say that Sickipedia have now made sure that comedians can be credited for their jokes.

Stop! (Joke) Thief! is a post from: David Schneider's website

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This is a picture of Denis Leary. That's all I'm saying.

Here’s a list of some specific joke spats to go with my Sunday Times article on joke thievery – with the odd youtube link that’s definitely worth watching. I have to thank Twitter for helping me locate a lot of these… Also, there’s one juicy possible joke-theft I haven’t included here. But will blog about that imminently…

Jokes which went round the net as TOMMY COOPER’s, actually by TIM VINE.
“So I rang up my local swimming baths. I said ‘Is that the local swimming baths?’ He said ‘It depends where you’re calling from.’”

“So I was getting into my car, and this bloke says to me “Can you give me a lift?” I said “Sure, you look great, the world’s your oyster, go for it.’”

Joke first told by JIMMY CARR at the Royal Variety Performance, 2002. Similar joke later used by JIM DAVIDSON on his BBC1 show “On the Road”
Someone came up to me last week and complained about a joke, quite a big-boned girl. She said: ‘I think you’re fattist’. I said: ‘No, I think you’re fattest’.”

American comic DENIS LEARY was constantly accused of ripping off fellow stand-up BILL HICKS. This joke forms part of the evidence.
Bill Hicks: The fact is we live in a world where John Lennon was murdered yet Barry Manilow continues to put out albums.
Denis Leary: We live in a country where John Lennon gets 6 bullets in the chest. Yoko Ono’s standing next to him – not one f**king bullet!
For more on this CLICK HERE.

Joke performed by MARCUS BRIGSTOCKE placed seventh in the TV Channel Dave’s funniest jokes on Edinburgh Fringe (August 09), and joke posted on Twitter in November 09 by popular Tweeter @SHITMYDADSAYS,  soon to get his own sitcom.
Brigstocke:”To the people who’ve got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn’t invent it!”
@Shitmydadsays: Son, noone gives a shit about all the things ur cellphone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anyone can do that.

Joke by JACK WHITEHALL, placed fifth in the funniest jokes on the Fringe, and joke made by ROBBIE WILLIAMS as part of Radio 1’s Electric Proms in October.
Jack Whitehall: “I’m sure wherever my dad is, he’s looking down on us. He’s not dead, just very condescending.”’
Robbie allegedly said: “I’m sure my aunt’s looking down on me now. She’s not dead, she’s just really condescending.”

Joke written by MARCUS BRIGSTOCKE but attributed on the internet to various computer people including BILL GATES
“If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music”

Joke posted by stand-up GARY DELANEY on Twitter (15^th July) then posted on by LILY ALLEN without crediting him (18^th July).
“Old MacDonald had Tourettes – E, I, E, I, CUNT”

Joke by comedian JOSIE LONG, submitted as his own to the Adam and Joe Show by a member of the public, JAMES HEWITT
“How much do you have to pay to play sport at Hogwarts? A quid each.”

Joke first performed by comic MICHAEL REDMOND then subsequently by JOE PASQUALE, according to fellow stand-up Stewart Lee (an absolute genius routine: CLICK HERE)
“People are always saying to me…. Get out of my garden!”

Joke posted on Twitter by Ross “Teddy” Craig in September 09, then posted by someone else on Sickipedia.org, October 09.
I’ve just had an all-day breakfast. My gran’s got alzheimers and loves to cook.

Comedy duo The Mighty Boosh accused a Sugar Puffs advert of ripping off their “crimping”, a form of rap. They took revenge by killing a Honey Monster in their live show.

Joke by ARI SCHAFFER, one of the comics American stand-up CARLOS MENCIA has been accused of stealing from. He’s been heckled and even hit by fellow comedians JOE ROGAN. (Great onstage row at L.A. Comedy Store – CLICK HERE)
Ari Schaffer: “Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to build a huge 12 foot wall along the Mexican/ Californian border to keep the Mexicans out. But Arnold, who do you think is going to build that wall?”
Carlos Mencia: “I propose we kick all the illegal aliens out of this country, then we build a superfence so they can’t get back in” – “Erm… Who’s going to build it?”

See also my Bill Hicks vs David Hare post.

Nicked Jokes. Allegedly. is a post from: David Schneider's website

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