For the second time in the past month or so, Patton Oswalt finds himself the victim of a thief.

Back in April, Oswalt was alerted to a video of a wannabe comic from Colorado performing Oswalt’s KFC Bowl bit at a club (a theater, really) in Iowa (The Harrison Hilltop). Oswalt posted the vid on his MySpace blog then followed it with a lengthy rumination on stealing– what it means to the artist, what it must mean for the thief, etc.

And I was also under the delusion that I’d developed enough of a voice – enough of a unique, personal voice – that my stuff would be hard to steal. And yet here’s Nick Madson – who, it turns out, is a stage actor – reciting huge chunks of my material and collecting a paycheck for doing it. I don’t think he does it particularly well – you’d think an actor would be able to fake subjective experience – but he’s at the minimum, trained-monkey competence to get laughs.

Turns out that the thief, when confronted, said that he wrote for Oswalt (and other comedians Louis CK and Dave Attell), so the gags were, in effect, his material, too.

Fast forward a few weeks to Class Day for the Columbia University School of General Studies and a speech delivered by class valedictorian Brian Corman. According to the New York Times, the political science major quoted several authors along with Oswalt, but credited all but Oswalt.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday Mr. Oswalt said the actions of Mr. Corman – who cited the authors of other quotations in his speech – reflected people’s lack of respect for comedians.

“In people’s heads they think that comedians can’t possibly make up their own material,” Mr. Oswalt said. “They must get it out of joke books.”

These same people, Mr. Oswalt said, “just can’t imagine that a comedian can make up original stuff.”

He added: “They’re like, ‘I can just take it. He didn’t make it up.'”

He says he was somewhat mollified by the speed and candor of the apology that Corman offered. (But is quick to point out that both Corman’s and Columbia’s apologies misspelled Oswalt’s name!)

Of course, Oswalt is being way too kind if he actually thinks that Corman is so ignorant as to believe that a comedian gets his gags from a joke book or a communal stockpile of material. The commenters on the NYT website are not so kind. Politics Paul from Pittsburgh writes:

Big problem with students like mine today, take the fast and plagiarized route and maybe nobody will notice. As a political scientist its even more disheartening but I have to say this is very typical of the work ethic and standards of today’s ‘students’.

We’re with PP here– probably more to do with laziness and maybe a little sense of entitlement… combined with what Oswalt alluded to earlier: a lack of respect for comedians.

But you need not have drilled down as far as Pittsburgh Paul’s comment to have arrived at this, Comment #2:

It’s not that funny to begin with. If you’re going to steal a joke, make sure it’ll make people laugh.

Ah! So… there you have it… the erudite NYT reader who overlooks the thievery to make a point about just how unfunny Patton Oswalt is! Oswalt isn’t funny, ergo his material cannot be stolen, and if it is, well… it’s not worth making a fuss over, because, after all, Oswalt is merely a comedian.

We play a game here at SHECKYmagazine HQ. We read an online story about comedians, then we determine the over/under on how many comments it takes to get to the snarky one that totally misses the point of the story but manages to make a derogatory statement about comedians. Embarrassingly, it only took until the second comment in this case.

Check out the MovieLine.com take on Oswalt’s Thievery Incident Number One! It’s titled, “Patton Oswalt Attacks Nobody For Stealing Material.” One needn’t wait until the comments to drink in the snark! It’s right there in Christopher Rosen’s headline and first graf:

What does a guy do after the Broadway show he’s starring in gets canceled because of his performance and then he’s removed from a comedy pilot after the first table reading? Well, if he’s Patton Oswalt, he scours the Internet to find out if disingenuous no-talents are stealing his stand-up material! Oswalt took to MySpace — God love you, Patton, but really: MySpace? — to out a pathetic joke stealer named Nick Madson, a Colorado comedian who did Oswalt’s routine at a club in Iowa on Wednesday. Needless to say: Someone get Madson a helmet.

In this case, however, it’s commenters to the rescue! They not only defend Oswalt, they accuse Rosen of serious douchebaggery. It restores our faith in mankind.

Rosen is a hack who traffics in pure cattiness. His attitude, though, is still startling. He’s supposed to have at least a barebones knowledge of how the entertainment industry works– he works for a publication that, at least when it was a hard copy magazine, had a national reputation as a respectable journal. The readers who comment seem to know more about Hollywood.

Scott Wampler writes a lengthy analysis of the Nick Madson theft incident for the Examiner.com, complete with a creepy B & W headshot of the thieving thespian and– bonus– his typo-riddled “apology.” And the extra delicious revelation that Oswalt discovers Madson’s apology to be pretty much total horseshit!

We were aware of the Madson thing when it happened. (But we were up to our necks in difficulties with Blogger!) But we did recall wondering at the time why a comedy club would book such a loser as Madson… and why the club wouldn’t subsequently sanction him hard and maybe even go the extra mile and apologize to Oswalt. We discovered that it wasn’t a real comedy club but a small-time theater and that the show Madson was on was part of the theater’s “Comedy Series.” Uh-oh.

These were two obvious cases of theft. The perps were amateurs and they deserved being called out and ripped in public. We’ve taken a dim view of the various video call-outs on Youtube and elsewhere– the ones involving professional comedians. We said that such matters were better off addressed “within the community.” We said that no good could come of airing dirty laundry. We also theorized that, if done too often, such video face-offs might lead to the public getting the idea that “comics steal all the time.” Indeed, the cliché that’s been peddled via the media and the pop culture has two Catskillian comedians holding decades-long grudges over stolen bits– decades after any such feud could be recalled firsthand by anyone or documented by any third party.  (But, for an awful lot of television screenplays,  it had the convenient potential to result in… MURDER!)

But terminating such pilfering by amateurs or actors or, as Oswalt cites, columnists (see Mike Barnicle, scroll down to “Boston Globe Controversy”), is a good and necessary thing.  And it reinforces the notion that such stealing is, without question, bad.  And it draws a bright line between professionals and amateurs.  And it reinforces the notion that comedians are, for the most part, totally and scrupulously original.