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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Justice without law: standup comedy division"

25 Comments -

1 – 25 of 25
Anonymous Dave Pinsen said...

I thought for a moment you were going to weigh in on the Colbert kerfuffle.

4/1/14, 4:09 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"""Indoctrination, criticism, ostracism, and violence are among the main tools for enforcing a set of social norms.""""


This is somewhat akin to President Andrew Jackson's mother's final words to him when he was a mere youth during the US Revolutionary War.

"Never resort to lawyers to settle arguments, you settle those things yourself."

And of course this became his informal creed of which he lived by, since Jackson fought many a duel to the death.

4/1/14, 4:14 PM

Anonymous Power Child said...

Indoctrination, criticism, ostracism, and violence are among the main tools for enforcing a set of social norms.

It's good to have this progression, but very bad when earlier steps are routinely skipped and we go straight to later ones.

It's like cracking a walnut: you don't want to just bash it with a hammer, because the pieces will fly everywhere and you'll be picking them up off the carpet instead of eating them. Instead, you want to apply gradual pressure and release the pressure once the walnut has cracked.

4/1/14, 4:27 PM

Anonymous Reg Cæsar said...

OK, how are jokes different from coders? Kinda looks like the Apple-Google-etc case, doesn't it?

I know an aspiring standup at my workplace who'll test his routine on me. One day about a decade ago he complained that our city's top comedy impresario told him to stop using one of his favorite jokes. Why? Because George Carlin was now using it.

Now, neither man stole it from the other. It was coincidence. (Though if it was a comic less original than Carlin, I might suspect someone in my friend's audience sold it to the big guy.)

My friend bemoaned the unfairness of it. I told him it didn't matter. Everyone would assume he stole the joke from Carlin, not the other way around

4/1/14, 4:37 PM

Anonymous John said...

A few years back Joe Rogan enforced these norms on Mencia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdugSUFbzws

4/1/14, 4:38 PM

Anonymous David said...

>the only copyright protection you have is a quick uppercut<

Everyone wants to be a gangsta.

4/1/14, 4:42 PM

Anonymous countenance said...

Indoctrination, criticism, ostracism, and violence are among the main tools for enforcing a set of social norms.

Or sometimes, cartels.

4/1/14, 4:52 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Justice without law"

Steve, you becoming an anarcho-capitalist?

fredyetagain

4/1/14, 5:00 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

...then they get blacklisted from clubs

What's the motivation for club owners to follow this code? I understand why a comedian who writes all of his jokes would despise joke thieves, even ones who didn't steal from him personally. But would club owners really forgo revenue to uphold the code of a trade to which they don't belong?

For any honor code to hold, the group's weakest links have to be pretty strong. I'm sure lots of singers would love to ostracize auto-tune out of existence, but apparently their weakest links are weaker than those of the comedians.

4/1/14, 5:04 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What if a comedian invents the joke, but fails repeatedly to get a laugh from it and gives it up. Face it lots of comedians can write material but simply lack the courage and drive to try out material over and over again risking bombing to make it finally work.
Next guy polishes it into a hit. Was he a thief?

The late stand up Bill Hicks developed lots of great material but never truly reached the big time. Hicks being the paranoid far lefty elitist alienated white audiences. Hicks was notorious for off nights when he completely freaked out. Hicks was an acquired taste, most popular with hipsters and the college crowd over in England who would tolerate his ranting meltdowns. Yet Denis Leary among others shamelessly reworked Hicks material over the years and had great success with it.

Kinda like all the elitist rock music critics who claimed they despised Jimmy Page for taking obscure and often unpublished blues riffs and making rock classics out of them. They hated Page with a passion, but loved all the rappers that blatantly "sampled" polished Led Zeppelin material.

What about the great composers who took folk tunes and expanded them into classic operas and symphonies?

Not saying the originators do not deserve their due compensation, but thief in this context is a bit strong.

Do Leary, Page and Strauss deserve to have their legs broken?

4/1/14, 5:23 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Indoctrination, criticism, ostracism, and violence are among the main tools for enforcing a set of social norms".

I agree. But I think the balance of the four tools varies significantly and perhaps predictably as the value of the norms increases. As does the competition for the exclusive right to use the tools. Kto kogo?


Neil Templeton

4/1/14, 5:24 PM

Anonymous Sequester Grundleplith said...

You've got to love the spectacle of liberal academics and journalists sticking their instruments in these strange birds called "custom" and "group cohesion".

4/1/14, 5:30 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Lots of jokes are not actually stolen.

Somebody writes a joke for a particular comedian. They do not get a major laugh from it. The original writer after a while resales the joke to a different comedian. Of course the writer does not always tell the comedians he is doing this. Fact is few comedians can write new material on the road. Too much weed to be smoked and pussy to be had.

Dangerfield is the classic case of a prolific writer who for years was a modest success. Other writers and comedians tried to rework his material. Until Rodney perfected his comic persona he never really "owned" his material. After that however, nobody could touch his stuff except as an homage.

4/1/14, 5:38 PM

Anonymous Ichabod Crane said...

The comedians with the best delivery should tell the best jokes. That would make me laugh.


4/1/14, 5:43 PM

Anonymous Katy said...

Off topic, but worthy of a Steve post:
OK Cupid is campaigning against Firefox use over the CEO's donation to the Proposition 8 Anti-gay marriage campaign in 2008...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/01/dating-website-okcupid-is-breaking-up-with-firefox/?tid=hpModule_1728cf4a-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e

4/1/14, 5:59 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Apparently George Lopez two-handed choked (like Homer Simpson choking Bart) Carlos Mencia for stealing material from him.

4/1/14, 6:11 PM

Anonymous Hunsdon said...

All the best jokes are running US foreign policy.

4/1/14, 6:23 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Off-topic, Steve, but are you planning to review Darren Aronofsky's NOAH? I'm quite eager to hear your thoughts on it.

4/1/14, 6:42 PM

Anonymous Harry Baldwin said...

Indoctrination, criticism, ostracism, and violence

These were the tools with which we used to assimilate immigrants. All have been put away.

4/1/14, 8:04 PM

Blogger The Anti-Gnostic said...

It's a odd thing when you come to think about it. The opportunities for abuse are just about everywhere. There's no requirements in the Texas State Constitution for bein a sheriff. Not a one. There is no such thing as a county law. You think about a job where you have pretty much the same authority as God and there is no requirements put upon you and you are charged with preserving nonexistent laws and you tell me if that's peculiar or not. Because I say that it is. Does it work? Yes. Ninety percent of the time. It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

-- Sheriff Bell, No Country For Old Men (Cormac McCarthy).

4/1/14, 9:01 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

copying is a form of cultural diffusion.

without it, we would still be living in trees.

without fire.

4/2/14, 12:56 AM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

In writing, reusing some great writer's joke (e.g., "Up to a point, Lord Copper") is considered mildly droll. E.g., Tina Brown's website is the Daily Beast, which is Lord Copper's newspaper in Waugh's "Scoop." Ideally, you'd work some variation on a classic line, but it's okay to quote it verbatim without explaining it's a quote.

This can cause some confusion. For example, in the 1980s my father-in-law was very impressed by my having invented the witticism "In African elections, it's one man, one vote, once." I never got around to telling him that this was an old joke in National Review circles, so old that it was considered fine to quote it without explaining that you hadn't invented it.

4/2/14, 1:54 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

Most comics seem to solve this problem by not actually telling jokes and by not being funny.

4/2/14, 7:12 AM

Anonymous BurplesonAFB said...

Came here to post the Joe Rogan Mencia video.

Steve, if you got an invite to Joe Rogan's podcast, would you do the show? He gets over a million listeners on popular ones, it's a long form (2-3hr) informal discussion which I think fits you better than 2 minute news segments, and he's got the alternative-thinking young male demographic's attention.

Actually Carolla's would be a good fit too. Both guys do their show around LA.

4/2/14, 10:34 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

In other words, there's a massive opportunity here for a lady comic to plagiarize and remix her heart out. (Because who's going to punch a girl?)

4/4/14, 1:29 PM

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