Also, I’m pretty sure most people don’t even remember where their jokes came from, so you’d just be making the world a less funny place if they had to cite their jokes. We just wouldn’t tell them. Asking as they aren’t making money off of them, I approve of the current situation.
Plus, if you’re a good comedian, the joke relies on your ability to tell it to be at its best. I literally couldn’t repeat any of Carlin, for example. Nor Louie C K.
So when you’re out with a bunch of friends, and you make a witty remark, and nobody hears except one guy, who then repeats the witty remark and gets a big laugh – totally cool, right?
Sure, I am so amusing that someone repeats my jokes, win!
Stealing is bad, quoting is not.
Remember that youth pastor who kept stealing jokes, including many from Patton Oswalt?
This is my take. The OP hasn’t been real explicit (that I saw) about how much his FB pal is:1) Actively claiming authorship of stuff he didn’t write.
2) Passively accepting lots of credit from his audience for stuff he didn’t write.
3) Simply reposting without attribution stuff that everybody will recognize as old or obvious jokes and any credit he gets is for his curation, not his originality.
IMO 1 is a minor social crime but evidence of major jerkitude, 2 is a evidence of minor jerkitude, and 3 is who cares.
Door #1 would rise to the level of an actionable copyright violation if either he or his sources are monetizing the eyeballs rather than just seeking social approval.
Whether you want to go all xkcd: Duty Calls on this guy is up to you. If the jerkitude bothers you enough, either blow his cover then unfriend him, or simply unfriend him. Either way, calling him out is unlikely to be well-received, at least by him.
Then again, the world will contain exactly as much jerkitude as the rest of us let the jerks exhibit. IOW … Jerkitude will expand to fill the space the good people leave open for it. So doing one’s bit to expose and ridicule jerkitude whenever and wherever it’s found is a pro-social act.
Several posts have IMO pointed out an important convention about jokes. ‘Guy walks into a bar’ type jokes whether new or old, but in that ‘classic’ style of not directly related to a current topic and not part of somebody else’s paid performance, are by convention not attributed. As suggested by the Family Guy episode where they travel to the ‘source of all jokes’ in a jungle somewhere, we don’t know where those jokes actually come from. So attributing them to the person we heard them from is not very meaningful. So it hasn’t been the convention to do so.
But, the convention arose under the general assumption you’d tell the joke, to a person or small informal group. But social media and the internet generally with their longer reach can undermine previous conventions by being kind of in between traditional conversation or personal letter on one hand and publishing on the other. So it’s not unreasonable IMO that OP would find something annoying about the FB ‘friend’s’ behavior depending on the details.
Also as others suggested, the OP leaves room for interpretation that maybe some of the jokes are either the known ‘work product’ of particular professional writers and/or current event topical quip type ‘jokes’ where it’s more likely we assume the quipper is claiming it as original if they don’t say otherwise; or where it’s been conventional to view as clownish people trying to give the impression they came up with clever current event quips we doubt they did.
I created a joke once (although it was really just an instance of a formula.) I later saw it in a Doonesbury strip, without any credit given to me.
Well, I swan! Time for us all to unfriend Garry Trudeau!
I posted something in an attorney’s FB thread about confederate statues.
3 days later, he copies my comments and posts them as his own.
I then post responses linking to other places in the web where I had posted the same thoughts (here, his FB page, others) saying “Just so we make sure authorship is being acknowledged, David.”
So, perhaps that’s what you should do. Post a link to the earlier joke(s), claiming that you want to make sure the author gets the credit.
Unspoken prayer requests bother me because it’s only natural to want to know what it is they’re wanting prayer about. To me if it’s too “private” to disclose why post about it at all? It’s like saying “the funniest thing happened to me today, but I’d rather not say what it was.” Then why bring it up at all?
It’s called Vaguebooking. (Attention seeking)
It’s a thing, look it up.
Its Twitter cousin is called “subtweeting” which is a little more specific in scope, but is basically throwing shade at someone else without directly @ing their user name or identifying them so they don’t get notified.
This
Also this. And I don’t think “I saw this on Twitter” is enough of an attribution to really be worth making.
This is why I can’t bring myself to care when politicians plagiarize. Plagiarism is a major crime for academics and poets. Their job, their raison d’etre, is to create new stuff. So if they steal someone else’s stuff it’s a big deal. But politicians are there to say things as well as possible, so as to move other people to action. Yeah, it would be nice if their speech writers and the other politicians they stole especially nice phrases from got some credit. But that’s not the main point.
If you are a professional comic, I get why you care. But unless this guy is monetizing his page, it seems like a minor sin at most. And, if his friends know that he’s just curating (you do, for instance) no sin at all.
Full disclosure: just last night I stole a joke from my husband and used it in a Facebook comment. But I usually do attribute funny or interesting stuff repeat.
That’s generally my view too. I prefer to share/retweet rather than Copy-Paste, for obvious reasons, but the reality is it seems highly unlike that Random Nobody On Social Media has a cutting, witty and hilarious insight into something that’s never occurred to anyone before.
Exactly.
Sorry, double post
Confession time:
I have taken very few of the pictures I post.
Thanks for the lesson, seriously. I’d never heard of either term.
Yes “vaguebooking” is something I very much dislike. I even posted about it when I saw someone doing it and they unfriended me, and I LIKED that. I guess, funny enough, I was guilty of subtweeting because the way it worked I saw a posting of “unspoken prayers please” and I posted on my own page “am I the only one getting tired of those silly unspoken prayers posts? Stop being vague. If it’s too private to talk about then don’t post anything at all, stop teasing people’s curiosity like that.”
I’m one who hates anything vague because it’s extra work having to solve a riddle etc and I hate extra work of that type. I am into specific, not “that Italian place near Broadway” but “Mamma Milo’s Italian located at 5683 E Broadway Boulevard” if you can’t tell me ALL that don’t tell me ANYTHING whatsoever.
Again this was my own post on my own page and I didn’t tag them or such. I’ve always thought that was the right way to do it though because you state your opinion without directly attacking someone and starting an argument. It’s the same as how during the election A would post pro Trump stuff B would post Clinton articles with neither one posting rebuttals to the other’s posts, state your opinion on your own page basically. Have I been wrong all this time?
Not necessarily “wrong”, just under-careful.
Smart thoughtful people post their own thoughts. Lazier unthoughtful people post other people’s thoughts because that’s easier.
This board is self-selecting to be full of the first kind of people. TwitFace takes anyone and everyone, so they have lots more of the second kind of people.
Which group you (any you) want to associate is up to you. Choose wisely to reduce the volume of anger & stupid piped into your life.
If I did not originate something intelligent/witty/thought-provoking that I am posting on Facebook, I will say so, and include “attribution on request” in the post.
I can’t remember anyone ever taking me up on that.
Who is this “someone” you saw vague-booking? Don’t talk around it, just tell us who it is.
I’m being facetious, as I don’t expect nor want you to reveal who unfriended you. But my point is sometimes people limit what they reveal on the internet for good reasons as well as poor ones.