Comedian claims Conan stole jokes from his website and Twitter account for the last two years.
A freelance writer that worked and contributed to Jay Leno’s Tonight Show for 20 years claims that he has also worked on ‘Conan’ a number of times this year – involuntarily, after the ‘Conan’ writers stole his jokes from Twitter. The comedian is suing Conan O’Brien, the writers, and TBS in California Federal Court.
Robert “Alex” Kaseberg argues that O’Brien used four of his original jokes in monologues on the show without his permission. According to reports, it is reasonable to believe that Kasebergs tweets are eerily similar to Conan’s but, the case is not that straight forward.
Here’s the first joke, “A Delta flight from Cleveland to New York took off with only two passengers. And they wrestled for control of the armrest the entire flight,” is one that Kaseberg writes was directly inspired by a Conan bit, “A Delta flight from Cleveland to New York took off with only two passengers. And they still managed to lose their luggage.”
Kaseberg writes that he wanted to do a similar joke, so he wrote the punchline and put it on his blog. The next day, Conan had the same punchline.
But, as Gawker pointed out, “Do the Conan writers read an unknown comedy writer’s personal Blogspot and lurk among the 1,300 people following him on Twitter, or did two people write the same joke about a topical news item? Hmm! An excellent question for a federal jury!”
The next month, Conan supposedly plagiarized a second joke from Kaseberg’s Twitter account: “Tom Brady has decided to give his Super Bowl MVP truck to the man who won the game for the Patriots. So enjoy that truck Pete Carroll.”
The third alleged joke that was stolen came in mid-February, also from Twitter: “It turns out the Washington Monument is ten inches shorter than previously thought. You know it has been a cold winter when even a monument has shrinkage.”
Kaseberg argues the following:
“Two times there is an impossibly slight possibility of a joke-writing coincidence, three times there is no possibility of a coincidence. And always used on the monologue one day or, in the case of the third time, six hours after it appeared on my blog and or Twitter.”
Kaseberg firmly believes his material was stolen despite the fact the jokes were based on current events. He called Conan’s head writers, Mike Sweeney, in hopes that he would either admit to using the jokes or offer him a job writing for the show and apparently, none of those things happened.
“We don’t have any openings,” said Sweeney, “and why would I want to hire someone who accuses us of stealing jokes?”
Mike Sweeney implied I had heard jokes on TV and wrongly assumed they were mine. Like I was some crazy man whose thoughts were being stolen by a TV show.
Conan representatives denied the lawsuit has any merit.
Source: Daily Dot
