Leno sues joke book compiler

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 30th, 2006

According to the LA Times, Jay Leno is suing Judy Brown, editor of such joke compilations as “Joke Stew” and “Joke Soup.”

Leno and NBC Studios filed a federal court lawsuit Wednesday to stop comedy teacher Judy Brown from publishing his punch lines in her books, which are largely compilations of jokes uttered by Leno and other comedians, including Ellen DeGeneres, Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, Lucille Ball and Tim Allen.

Also included among the many comedians in at least two of the compilations are The Male and Female Halves of the Staff. Way back in 2000, we signed a release, submitted a handful of jokes and felt that the inclusion of a joke or two in a joke book (and any ensuing “exposure”) was a way of cementing our place in the annals of standup history and a good way to promote the magazine. (We even ran one example per day, from the first book, on the front page of the magazine. We did so with Brown’s permission, assuming that, if we signed a release, so had all the other comedians featured in the book, and that was where our responsibility ended.)

That we were included in a subequent tome or two gave us pause, but we figured that maybe we hadn’t read the release carefully enough, so that was our fault. Besides, we haven’t the wherewithal to sue anyone.

From reading the account of the lawsuit in the LAT, it looks like Brown made a fatal error by taking the gags off the television (from, we assume, the nightly Tonight Show monologues), without the permission of Leno, NBC or Big Dog.

Leno plans to donate any proceeds from the lawsuit to charity.

Joke compilation books are a time-honored tradition. In the past, though, the jokes are rarely attributed. At the very least, Brown attributed all the jokes in her collections and provided a bio of each “contributor” in the back of each volume. This may or may not vindicate her, but we have on hand here at SHECKYmagazine HQ a half-dozen similar such books that don’t identify the author and that has always galled us.

If, as Leno’s suit alleges, Brown has collected and published gags without permission, she and her publisher are probably going to pay dearly.

ADDENDUM: The Male Half had a joke appropriated, without permission, approximately 20 years ago for use in a collection of jokes published by Random House. We suspect that the joke was scraped off of an early TV appearance or from an interview with a newspaper in Lancaster, PA. (We suspect this, because he never used the gag in the act and only used in one TV appearance and in one interview with a newspaper in Lancaster, PA.) No permission was sought. When a letter was written, asking at the very least for one copy of the book in question as compensation for the use of the joke, the letter was ignored totally! Ignored! Totally! No response!

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