Material police investigate Curb's kamikaze origins (UPDATE)

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 3rd, 2005

Just got an email from Yoshi himself. It seems that David did follow up on that phone call he alluded to in the Herald article:

Yes, he called. And I got a little flustered. He is just like the character in the show. He just told me it is just an unfortunate coincidence. And I believe him. Since he told me he doesn’t have writers for him.

Happy ending! It seems it was all a misunderstanding.

FOS Rick Jenkins sent us a heads up about an article in the Boston Herald by Sean L. McCarthy which gives a thorough airing to L.A.-based comic Yoshi Obayashi‘s suspicions about his opening bit turning up on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Obayashi has been opening with a bit about his grandfather being a retired kamikaze pilot. A recent episode of Curb featured a friend, named Yoshi, whose grandfather was a kamikaze pilot. The gag in both cases is that he “was obviously not very good.”

We bring it to your attention, not because we’re interested in policing material theft (that’s a role best left to others), but because we were struck by the Herald going out of its way to air the complaint. A lot of us have seen our gags turn up on television– usually in a sitcom script, sometimes out of the mouth of a fellow comic– but we usually shrug and move on. In this case, the Herald went so far as to quiz David about the “coincidence.” A sign of Curb fatigue perhaps? A trend toward helping comics protect their intellectual property? As the Herald article says in the last sentence– stay tuned.

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