I have a Facebook friend (whom I have never met in real life but was a friend of a friend) who seems otherwise very nice but will take jokes from a handful of Twitter accounts and post them as their own. People reading their page have no idea and will constantly complement them on their humor.
I know I probably shouldn’t care but as a person who has performed stand up comedy, joke stealing offends me. I have never said anything openly and probably never will because Facebook is not worth it although at one time I had considered “innocently” sharing the original stolen tweet on my page but I didn’t. My only passive aggressive reaction is to not like or comment on those posts.
I know this happens a lot and there are Twitter and Instagram accounts out there that make a lot of money stealing other people’s stuff and this is just a person convincing their friends they are funnier than they really are but still…
Does this kind of thing bother you? What other minor social media annoyances bother you more than they should?
Social media is *based *on the concept of sharing/reposting/retweeting content. Do you expect nobody in the world to tell a joke unless they’ve made it up themselves?
Most people don’t know the original source for most jokes they tell. If they remember anything about the source at all, it’s just going to be “some guy at the bar told me…”, or the like. And the guy at the bar probably heard it from his cousin, and the cousin probably heard it from someone at work, and so on.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Maybe they don’t understand the “share” function, and C&Ping is their only way of making posts.
In my opinion, I never thought joke stealing was a thing, off stage.
I also never assume a joke told by a non performer was written by them, and any compliments they get for their humor, is based on which jokes they choose to retell and which ones they don’t.
FWIW in my story above the person reads something funny on twitter and posts it as if they thought of it themselves and accepts the accolades when people tell them how funny they are. They are stealing not sharing. Sharing wouldn’t bother me one bit.
That’s true. But it’s one thing when you retell a joke you heard in person, paraphrasing and adding your own take. Even with professional comedians who “steal” jokes, they’re at least performing them personally. Telling other people’s jokes shouldn’t be any worse than, say, being a cover band. Maybe you’re not original, but you’re entertaining.
But just copy-pasting text from somewhere without attribution? What are you adding?
You’re adding audience. If a joke is enjoyable, and some person had never heard it before but now does hear if from you, then you’re increasing the enjoyment in the world.
Yeah, that sort of thing bothers me. I’ll even search out and share the original tweet or facebook post if someone is sharing a screen shot (or other semi-attributed) non-dynamic version.
But how is the average person to even know where the original came from? If they saw it on Twitter or elsewhere, chances are the person who tweeted also saw it somewhere else and repeated it, and so did the person they c&p’d it from. And who’s to say there even is one verifiable original source? In the 70s, probably millions of people made up “Sunshine on my shoulders make me sunburn” independently of each other. More recently, all the potty-mouthed chef jokes when Wichita hired their current police chief.
Frankly, the OP sounds like he’s pissed because someone on FB (that he doesn’t even know) is getting more laughs than he is.
I doubt the OP would care if the person in question were C&Ping crappy jokes that nobody laughed at.
Also, having a good sense of humor means knowing which jokes are funny, and which are not. So from the sound of it, people are right to compliment his sense of humor.
