Oh, God… another one. Another article on joke thievery. This time, it’s in a theater blog attached to a British newspaper, the Guardian, and the amateur sleuth is James Kettle (who writes about comedy a lot and fancies himself an expert on the subject).

“Has Keith Chegwin been stealing comedians’ jokes on Twitter?” is the question posed in the headline. And the answer seems to be “Yes.”

But we don’t have a problem with pointing out that Chegwin is a joke thief. Because “Cheggers” seems to be a serial joke-stealer. And he also seems curiously unrepentant.

What we do have a problem with is many of the assumptions that Kettle makes. And many of his pronouncements about standup just serve to perpetuate ridiculous myths about standup comics and standup comedy in general.

Among the gags retold by the one-time player of pop were identifiable jokes written by a number of contemporary standup stars, including Milton Jones, Lee Mack and Jimmy Carr. And what Cheggers presumably envisaged as a warm-hearted bit of fun has stirred up a sizeable amount of bad feeling within the comedy community. One comedian, Ed Byrne, even took Chegwin to task on Twitter, telling him he was wrong not to credit “working comics” for the jokes he was using.

Now, you could be forgiven for reflexively assuming that the standups are being a little bit precious about this (and that’s the line Chegwin has taken, telling his followers with apparent glee that he’s managed to upset the “ususal [sic] bunch of jealous comics”). And to be fair, a lot of people have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the concept of intellectual property. But it surely can’t be that hard to grasp the principle that whether you’re in a building site, an office or browsing on the internet, finding out that someone is passing off your hard work as their own is not exactly on– especially if you’re working freelance, as pretty much every comic is.

Kettle goes on to say that such a cavalier attitude might not have been out of place back in the days before “alternative comedy” took hold in England. It refers to a break in style and approach, the two factions being represented by Bernard Manning (old school) and Ben Elton (new school).

The idea that a comedian had outright ownership of his material seems to have taken root in this country once (Bernard) Manning et al gave way to the Ben Elton generation. For the original alternative comedians, simple gag-telling was far less important than presenting a fully-formed original perspective on the world.

(Of course, their use of the term “alternative” differs from ours. A similar changeover occured here in America twenty years earlier.)

The article is interesting and useful for it’s window into the history of the evolution of British comedy (and for the knowledge of the British comedy scene it imparts). But we’re afraid that it’s not very helpful when it comes to definitively coming down hard on real, certifiable joke thieves– The language used is a bit too mushy for our liking, e.g.: “…Jimmy Carr threatened to sue Jim Davidson for copying a routine the Channel 4 star believed was his…” Believed? Oh, no– If Jimmy Carr goes to the trouble of suing, Carr is certain (and we are, too) that the gags are his. Let’s give original and prolific comedian/writers like Carr the benefit of the doubt, okay?

And that’s the trouble with all these articles about joke thievery (and about the public airing of grudges and the conduct of informal joke-stealing trials via YouTube and Twitter and other social and mainstream media)– they make theft seem like a much more pervasive problem than it is. And they turn the public into annoying, ill-informed sleuths. (Just check out the comments that inevitably follow these kinds of articles… the accusations are ludicrous and sickening.)

And check out some of the tweets related to Last Comic Standing. We were horrified to read some of them. After each airing of an LCS episode, there are tweets that accuse this comic of ripping off that comic. We reached the end of our patience when one weasel tweeted that DeStefano had “totally ripped off” a bit from Jim Gaffigan. WTF?!! It soon became a parlor game at SHECKY HQ– see if we could top that one! “WTF? Bill Hicks totally ripped off Phyllis Diller!” or “OMG! Doug Stanhope so stole that bit from Shields and Yarnell!”

We warned folks early on, when this trend was just gaining some steam. We cautioned everyone about taking this kind of thing public. The genie seems to be out of the bottle. (We totally ripped off that turn of phrase from Barbara Eden!)