Steal This Blog...Please

I was watching a speaker open with something really funny.  I know because this speaker was opening with MY JOKE!  The Internet has become a place where people post jokes and stories that their grandma emailed them and, somewhere along the line, the name of the person who wrote those jokes gets removed.

Nobody seems to care as stealing is becoming acceptable.

You tell me – is this really weird?

I got a call from a speaker who watched my acronym routine on YouTube and requested a transcription of it.  Why? Because she wanted to use it!  How lazy are you that you need additional help from the very person you are stealing from -- to write out the routine you want to steal?

As I ripped her a new one, she was shocked and said, “It's not like it's so original.”

Now, she's dissin' the very material she thought a few minutes ago was good enough to steal!

So – here is why stealing is SO wrong:

1. It doesn't look good for you to do material that people have heard elsewhere. If your grandma emailed you a joke, chances are it's gone around.

2. An audience will sense that material is NOT authentic to you and thus destroys credibility.

3. You are undermining your own creative process. Stealing says, "I can't create."

You CAN write your own material and I can PROVE it!  Comedy material is not just relating the so-called funny things that happened to you or memorizing Internet jokes. Comedy is where you take something that is UNFUNNY and you do SOMETHING with it.  You act it out. You compare it to something. You discover the irony. You DO SOMETHING.

For instance: A pen is NOT funny.  But let's do something with it.  Answer this question:

A pen is JUST LIKE SEX BECAUSE...

Don't be scared – try it.  WRITE YOUR JOKE in the comment portion.

Congratulations!  You’ve now engaged in the creative process.  You are now GIVING rather than STEALING.  Doesn't it feel good?  Continue on!