ThinkProgress: Did Saturday Night Live steal a sketch from Groundlings?
The bit in question features three Tina Turner impersonators singing “Proud Mary.” They work on a riverboat. They do not like working on the riverboat. They break from singing, periodically, to tell the audience their tales of woe. They wear sparkly red dresses and Turner wigs.
3 comments:
With so many people out there some jokes are bound to get "stolen" on accident, but also with such easy exchange of information, it would be really easy to steal jokes for real. At this point in its life it feels like SNL only exists for the presidential election. Every four years they are really funny for a bit until the election ends and than its 3 years of the same bad jokes on repeat. After losing Seth the show has gone even more downhill. Even their season premiere was only about 50% new. They had all summer and they could not come up with one completely new episode. At this point watching it is like watching a dying fish. Someone laughs so they stretch out the joke as long as they can. They desperately need new writers whether they are stealing jokes or not. I still watch it, mostly for the Weekend Update, but the person who just replaced Cecily Strong is horrible and if they don't replace him soon they might lose me as a viewer.
The line between being influenced by someone and stealing a concept from someone is becoming more ambiguous every minute. We live in an age where the ability to create, and copy, and propagate concepts and ideas and jokes is easy. As easy as clicking a button at times. The sheer volume of created things available for free on the internet makes treading on the toes of others altogether too easy. I think this article does raise the important question of how much is too much.
While I do agree that there may be a fine line distinguishing joke theft, I think A company as huge as SNL should know better. Clearly, the SNL writers are MORE than capable of writing absurdly hilarious sketched all on their own. They have no excuse for stealing steeling content from any source, no matter how big or small. It's especially embarrassing that the writers would deny that the idea was stolen, as it was quite obviously copied in both content and design. Even if there is such a huge "joke pool" that something is bound to get stolen, a company as huge as SNL should then make it their responsibility to research their ideas and make sure they are truly original.
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