Now I’m heading back to London. My foot is on the floor, I’m doing eighty-five and I’m furious. This is difficult to swallow, like a big fat greasy oven chip.
‘Plagiarism!’ someone shouts at me halfway through a student gig.
‘Four syllables, that’s good for Folkestone University,’ I reply. Then it dawns on me what they’ve said. So I check.
‘What did you say?!’
‘Mickey Spinola used that line on TV last night.’
‘Oh,’ I reply. (It’s my line, Spinola’s the plagiarist.) Then I ask the runt his name, what he’s studying. No reply. ‘What, you find that out in your second year do you?’
Laughter and jeers, then we get on with the show.
Afterwards, Sid the ents. manager is smiling. (Like most ents. managers he looks like a pirate – black T-shirt, earrings and a pony-tail – although unsurprisingly he’s failed to organise a parrot.) ‘I thought that’s where you’d got it!’ he beams.
I give him a withering look. Why would I knowingly nick the joke of someone famous that they’d used on TV last night?
Student gigs are as good as the enthusiasm of the person running it. This one started late, no one knew how to turn off the fruit machines at the back of the room, and during the interval someone nicked the microphone. I ended up standing on a table shouting at people.
At the interval I call home, and sure enough Pete Pendleton has phoned to say he saw Spinola do my stuff on the box last night.
A brand new VW Polo (smug) shoots past, and as it pulls in front, sends windscreen washer fluid up into the air like a stubby little whale showing off.
Mickey Spinola was a young mainstream act when alternative comedy broke out. He adapted by charming audiences and brazenly borrowing the material of the less famous. Apparently, if ever confronted, he blames his writers. Sure enough, it’s them who go round and cream off the best from the rest, but he’s been warned too many times now, not to know what they do.
The truth is, he doesn’t care. He conveniently observes the old tradition of if it’s ‘out there’ then anyone can use it. Well his car is ‘out there’ somewhere too, I wonder how he would feel if I nicked that? That wouldn’t be such a bad idea – get the Press involved. Although, thinking about it, his car is probably made from bits of other people’s cars.
Wouldn’t happen in any other art form. Oh no, not in music, fine art, literature – they would all go to court. But which up and coming comic wants to be known for suing someone, rather than for being funny?
Must put my seat belt on. (Except now I’m not sure if it’s riskier to put it on while moving.) And now it’s beginning to rain: just enough for the windscreen wipers to smear the window and then groan with dryness. Out of windscreen wash too – Spinola’s probably siphoned it off.
Sure, when comics start out their style often appears a bit like someone else’s, but if they’re any good they soon develop a voice of their own. In the old days (pre-1980s) it was common practice for comedians to ‘share’ material, because often a lot of their patter was a mixture of old pub gags and folklore. They could get away with this because performances were live and mostly to just a few hundred people at a time. But once a joke has been on telly you can’t use it ever again. Okay you can, but not for a while.
It’s raining properly now. I feel like King Lear in the storm. King Lear in a car in the storm. Cursing fate and the elements with all my rage, but with a tiny Magic Tree air freshener hanging from the mirror.
Sure there are grey areas – heckle put downs and certain MC-ing techniques that a lot of people seem to use – but I guess exceptions are made because of it being a potentially make or break situation. But this is just theft, and I feel assaulted. Except it’s not just theft, it’s replication, and most audiences will assume that what they see on TV is the original and what they hear in the backroom of a pub is the copy.
A stick man in a little red pyramid – is he digging a pile of triangular dirt or trying to pick up a Christmas tree? Road works ahead! The final insult: injustice, rain and gridlock, and it’s 1.30 in the morning. Eight hundred yards – then three lanes down to two. Most of us are already queuing in two lanes, but the occasional chancer shoots down the outside to cut in at the front of the line. That’s the way it is now. Stand-up will soon be a course at university, you’ll see – everyone is desperate to have a go. Look at them jumping the queue and going straight to telly. I won’t be letting anyone cut in tonight.
Sometimes routines are lifted from across the Atlantic, or whole acts can turn up translated into Swedish or Afrikaans. But individual joke theft is difficult to prove, after all, everyone deals in them. They’re exchanged at school, at work and in pubs. People just want to laugh; they don’t care where the gag comes from. It hurts more than I thought it would – like someone passing off your child as their own.
Of course, it’s possible to think of the same joke as someone else, after all there are only so many subjects and so many formulas. It’s also true that in the heat of the moment you might come up with certain words a little too easily and only realise later that they belong to someone else. But amongst ourselves we know who the magpies are, the junkies who have to keep robbing to support their habit.
Anger usually takes a little while to trickle through my system, but this has me clench-jawed and white-knuckled already. I’ve a good mind to drive up to the West End and see if I can find him. Don’t know why I think he’s there, but at this moment it seems worth taking the chance. I mean I’ve had concepts nicked before. Gags driven into the workshop, serial numbers removed, then re-sprayed and driven out as new. But Spinola doesn’t even try. He nicks jokes and then uses them even in the same order as his victim did.
Two lorries are overtaking each other and blocking the whole road. When I get up close there is a huge blinding spray from both of them, I’m going to have to take them both on the outside. But the gap’s a bit too small. My sphincter tightens.
‘Come on, come on.’
I use my horn. Not that they can hear it, or could even go any faster if they wanted to. It’s a Dutch lorry overtaking a Polish one. Off the ferry, probably – full of clogs and potatoes respectively. Alien typefaces. But they both know the international language of juggernauts. A dip of the headlights to say it’s safe to pull in front, then, when the manoeuvre is complete, a flick of the hazard lights by the new leader of the convoy. It’s all nods and winks amongst professionals. I wonder if the same move is repeated in the cafe at the services when Johan, who is ready to pay, has to overtake Lech, who is still waiting for his soup?
I can always write another joke. But then he can always steal it again. It’s the principle. If I had unlimited money I’d hire a private detective to search through all old scripts and tapes to see who’s nicked what. Then I’d burst into their workshops in the middle of the night – sending tools and spray paint flying and get them to sign a confession … which wouldn’t work … cos none of them can write, of course … I AM SO ANGRY!
I swish down the M40 slicing through the folds of rain; the wipers have to work harder now to clear my vision.
Part of me doesn’t want to confront Spinola at all. I might have pity on him. He probably has a son in a wheelchair, or something. Well, he will have when I’ve finished.
‘I suppose it’s a compliment, him stealing your joke,’ said the ents. manager.
A pirate would say that.