Modified On November 3, 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.