Amy Schumer Now Under Fire For Potentially Stealing Jokes For Her Special From Patrice O'Neal

Joke stealing. So hot in the streets right now. Just last week there were questions about Trevor Noah stealing a racism bit from Dave Chappelle. I’m gonna go ahead and say everything is fine between those two guys after seeing this

Dave and Trevor (and Kevin Nealon) looking like a couple of chums on the streets of DC yesterday. My guess is if Chappelle was pissed or even had a thought that Noah stole his material they wouldn’t be all buddy buddy. Maybe Chappelle gave him his blessing or something. The bits did seem pretty similar.

Anyway. Like I said for the Chappelle/Noah thing, it’s impossible to know if a person outright stole another person’s joke unless they admit it. To go even further, you’d have to be a fucking idiot to steal a joke in 2015. Why?  Well because of exactly what’s happening with this Schumer/O’Neal thing. Schumer’s special goes over like gangbusters, everybody loves her and everything she does (I do like her. Her show is funny and it’s been fun watching her fame explode over the past 12 months). But then you see the dreaded “VIDEO SURFACES” headline and it’s a clip of Patrice O’Neal from almost 10 years ago telling eerily similar jokes on stage. At this point any joke told by even a semi-famous comedian in the past 20ish years is swirling around on YouTube somewhere. If you bite a bit from somebody then perform it at, oh I don’t know, let’s say the Apollo Theater for an HBO special people are gonna take notice. So she either told jokes that she came up with and it’s all a coincidence or she’s really stupid for not thinking people would find out (especially since they were her closers).

For this specific case the potential smoking gun isn’t that she told basically the same jokes that Patrice told. It’s that she told them in the same order as Patrice.  Like exactly. That takes things a little further than, “Oh well maybe they just had the same idea and it just happened to sound kinda similar when they told it on stage.” Now we’re getting in the territory of too many coincidences. As always I have no fucking clue what the truth is. We’ll probably never find out the truth.  It’s just interesting. The idea of where jokes start and who owns them.  I will say this, Patrice told those jokes roughly a billion times better than Schumer did. That much is a fact.

Related- If you’ve never watched Patrice’s stand up special “Elephant in the Room” I’m making it mandatory homework.  It’s funny as fuck.