Hopefully some original thoughts about ripping off or riffing off jokes on social media
I’ve noticed a trend, especially on Twitter but also in some other social media places — people writing jokes or snarky quips as if they were the first to come up with them, when there are literally dozens of other examples. Sometimes it’s possible to identify the original author, sometimes that’s already lost to time or drowned out by the chorus, so even if you wanted to search for it you wouldn’t be able to find the primary source.
Twitter offers a few different ways to say “I want to make this joke but I didn’t make it up myself”. It’s common to prefix with “OH:”, but that’s somewhat wrought because sometimes that means “I did make this up but I don’t want the credit for it”. And of course if you can find the original author there’s always the retweet option.
But people are seemingly not doing that, and just posting tweets posing as original jokes. Increasingly, I’m finding that when I read any funny tweet, there are probably many others exactly like it. Some of them go more viral than others. I hesitate to call this plagiarism per se, but are these people all independently coming up with the same jokes or are they seeping into the collective unconscious somehow so people only think they’re that funny? Do people think these are original jokes? Do people think that a tweet isn’t supposed to represent an original thought? Is it, in fact, supposed to? Probably, since they’re copyrightable, but I don’t really know where we stand on this from a sociological standpoint. I don’t know if I have an opinion on whether this is a bad phenomenon — after all, I’m a big supporter of remix culture — but I think it’s worth noting, and it’s also worth noting that remix culture works best when original creators get recognition, which is sorely lacking here.
Here are a few I’ve catalogued recently. Some are mildly NSFW.
Invested in stocks, now I’m a boullionaire.
Also there’s a whole separate pile from people who know how to spell bouillon.
Sex with a vampire
Emptying and refilling the dishwasher
Iron and carbon what a steel
No thyme to dye
Cooking with wine 5 glasses
This one is so old.
“Martha Stewart” Garlic Hack
This one’s not a twitter joke, but it’s an example I’ve noticed of cavalier attribution. In 2011, Todd Coleman appeared in a video from Saveur demonstrating how to peel a head of garlic in 10 seconds. Somehow The Kitchn decided to attribute this to Martha Stewart instead, despite linking to the original video in their post, and a bunch of other people picked it up.
Fast Ten your seatbelts
Dad Bod, Father Figure
Neck Romancers
Vampires are popular around these parts.
NFTs are like naming a star
Someone pointed this one out to me. Actually many people are pretty good about attributing this to someone else who probably also isn’t the first person to come up with it, but if you scroll down in the results there’s a whole block where they aren’t.
The War on Christmas in November
As far as I can tell, the original was posted two weeks ago at the time of writing this, and doesn’t even appear in the search results.
Andgasm
Surprising range of takes on this one.
Sequel Injection
Just keep the damn box
It’s a lovely axe
Rage Against the Machine Printer
There are probably other kinds of hated machines but people hate this one a lot.
Almond Milk isn’t even entirely made from almonds
But it’s still going over three years later
this one is just a weird thing to take credit for inventing if you didn’t
Scattered but not cremated
Ruining other people’s vacations will not fill the void in your soul.
Honorable mention! Lots of people want to have sex at Disneyland, but not everyone has this level of originality. Strong work, Kyle!
I don’t have a lot of conclusions here, but if you want to talk about it or comb through my twitter history to find someplace where I’ve inadvertently done this so you can call me a hypocrite even though I try really hard to not pass off other people’s jokes as my own, you can find me at https://twitter.com/fields. Also I definitely invented sous vide french toast.
