The Internet Notices Serial Plagiarist Amy Schumer's Best Oscars Joke Bears a Striking Resemblance to a Viral Joke from a Few Months Ago
When I intentionally skipped the Oscars this year for probably the first time since I was in preschool, I did so knowing that, like with any late night talk show or SNL episode, if there was anything worthwhile on there, I wouldn't miss out because the internet would bring it to my attention in short order. Which of course, happened. First came the slap. And then this Amy Schumer joke, which by all accounts was by far the laugh of the night.
That's the perfect Oscars host joke. Funny. A little bit edgy. Enough to make some people uncomfortable, while the subject of the joke isn't actually bothered since it just reminds everyone he is one of the world's great swordsmen. You can just picture a more irreverent awards show host like Ricky Gervais, David Letterman - or dare I say Chris Rock - landing this one. So give Amy Schumer all the credit for coming up with it.
Except that, like a seemingly crazy, disproportionately high percentage of her best material, someone else said it first. Back in December:
Now to be fair, everybody who writes jokes for a living runs into this problem once in a while. It's inevitable. It's like writing music; there are only so many guitar chords that can be put into just so many different combinations. But then again, when you play the exact same chords into the exact same order, someone is (pardon the pun) getting slapped. With a lawsuit.
This joke by Nicole Conlan is so verbatim to Schumer's joke, you have to wonder. Besides, while there are probably 10 billion Twitter references each year to DiCaprio's track record with the under-25 female demographic, only this one got 261K likes, 17K Retweets, and another 3,500 quote Tweets. A joke that viral will echo down the social media canyon for months.
And once Schumer delivered the line, it didn't miss the attention of the literally hundreds of thousands who loved it the first time they read it:
Advertisement
Advertisement
Yet I'm sure that Schumer and the Oscars writing staff will claim the joke missed them entirely. And they may be entirely truthful if they do. It's just uncanny how the same mistake can keep happening to the same handful of comedians. Over and over again. Carlos Mencia. Dane Cook. Denis Leary. I mean, Robin Williams was a notorious sponge who outright lifted bits from a comic or two that I worked with and then burned them by using them on national TV. But he didn't deny his joke thievery. In fact, there's an old line that goes, "Robin Williams goes into a club. He watches a comic, but he doesn't like his act. So he steals the guy's wallet." Not the funniest joke necessarily, but definitely on point.
Though no one in memory has been accused as often and by as many people as Amy Schumer has. And on the biggest emceeing night of her career, just happens to get called out again for lifting a line that got a lot of traction when it first appeared just before Christmas. Meaning she's either guilty of what they say about her, or she has the worst luck of any comic in the business. And that bad luck streak has lasted her entire career.