Wow…not sure what I did to deserve that. But to turn it around, I am starting to think I seemed to have touched so many nerves because some people reading this do the same thing and want to rationalize their stealing.
Taking credit for someone else’s work and implying it’s your own is stealing. In the big scheme of things it’s a minor example of theft but it is theft nonetheless.
I’m with OP on this one. If it’s an old joke, like “a guy walks into a bar,” I think that’s one thing, but if it’s a typical Twitter quip then copying and pasting without accrediting the source is just as bad as copying and pasting someone’s blog post into a response here on the straight dope. It’s plagiarism. That’s frowned upon here, stealing jokes from Twitter should be treated no different.
Who’s taking credit for anything? If I see someone posting a joke, why would I assume that it’s original to them? Everyone knows that it usually isn’t, so there’s no point in saying so,
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to offend. I just get the sense that your anger stems from something other than “stealing”.
Getting mad at a comedian stealing jokes from other comedians is understandable as it directly affects the originator.
Getting upset that some guy on FB stole a one off joke from some unknown person on Twitter is akin to getting outraged at someone for stealing a grape at the grocery store.
“Everyone” certainly do not. Some people can’t even recognize famous quotes and will comment “That’s so smart, did you come up with that?”
Why would you assume it’s original? Same reason you assume people’s posts here are original to them. Convention and societal rules.
Maybe we should take a poll, but if someone posts an interesting quip on FB, I assume it’s an original quip. It might not be unique, in that there are probably thousands of people who thought of the same quip – that’s what sets us normal folk apart from the professionals – but I assume that the quip isn’t a rehash of something else they read, or worse, copied verbatim.
Certainly, then, I’m not included in your “everyone,” and I’d go farther and wager that if you assume that observational quips on FB and twitter are plagiarized, that’d put you in a minority.
OP specifically used the word “bothered” in the thread title and first post, and described this as an “annoyance.” Let’s not attribute unnecessary emotion to an IMHO thread.
I think Tim Watley converted to Judaism for the jokes!
Meh.
It’s the principle of the thing.
Easy enough to credit a joke with a link or two.
The behavior described by the OP is what I’d call “jacking”.
It’s theft to take as your own somebody else’s intellectual property.
So did I.
How many jokes does one tell without giving credit to an unknown source?
I don’t assume that jokes were conceived by the person who tells them.
Perhaps the problem is when someone takes credit for the joke or tale.
“I was in Mexico, asking a bandit where his badge was, and he replied, ‘Badges? I ain’t got no badges! I don’t have to show you no stinking badges!’, so I shot him.”
He’s already got the big two religions covered. If he ever gets Polish citizenship, there’ll be no stopping him!
Attribution: I stole that from Seinfeld.
It’s poor form, at best. Attribute, if you know the source and care to make a minimal effort to be a decent human being. Basking in undeserved compliments without at least saying “I forget where I heard that” is just pathetic.
No worries.
I’m not angry. I just think it’s shitty behavior. And to quote Jerry, “It offends me as a comedian!” 
I agree with this distinction, but I’d like to know if the OP is talking about “Three guys walk into a bar” type jokes, or current-event specific quips. Those are really different things. Classic jokes/riddles/puns are not assumed to be original and don’t need to be attributed.
That said, this one guy on my facebook started posting an unending stream of bad dad jokes, unattributed. That was fine. They clearly weren’t his. But then a mutual friend started C&Ping the exact same ones, which did annoy me: I think the first guy was at least acting as a gatekeeper, selecting the best out of some old kid’s book or something. The second guy was just respamming all of their (many) mutual friends.
The societal convention about posts here is that they’re original to the person posting them. The societal convention about jokes is that the person sharing them probably heard them from somewhere else first. By not assuming any claim of attribution, I am following the societal convention.
Not “Why did the chicken cross the road?” jokes (why would that bother anybody?). The funny and clever quips and observations and stories you often see on Twitter from professional and semi professional comedians.
Actively pretending authorship is wrong. “I came up with this joke yesterday while in the bath…”
Merely posting without attribution is only a major sin in academia, for scholarly papers. For sharing on Facebook, full attribution with footnotes would be an absurdity. No one would care.
I’ll tell you what grinds my gears: People who try to manipulate you by saying things like 'If you really care about racism (or women’s rights or suicide or cancer, etc) copy and paste this onto your wall. I’ll know who has integrity when I see this on your wall."
I always feel manipulated so I ignore it…then I feel guilty that the poster thinks I lack integrity (yes I was raised Catholic).
Hee. I came into the thread to belatedly attribute my post.
Chronos has it right. Crediting jokes is not normal. Most jokes anyone tells are not original to them, so you wouldn’t even be crediting the right person.
Comedians care because it’s their livelihood. So they have informal rules, allowing the person who came up with a joke to get paid for it. This is often a problem when “funny” people move into standup. They don’t get the rules.
But, in normal life, the point of jokes is for people to tell them to each other. I’ve never heard anyone attribute their jokes. And they aren’t comedians, so they clearly don’t write them themselves.
The closest thing I see to attribution is when someone links a video online.