When you see upward of twenty shows during the festival, there are plenty of moments of deja vu. The slightly older comedian complaining about young people’s “music”; the references to 80s pop culture; a throwaway gag about Facebook. The feeling isn’t overwhelming, because comedians are always reacting to and commenting on human experience and society, and those things are pretty universal. Besides, while the themes might be the same, the jokes are unique… most of the time.

I may be a ‘just in’ Generation Xer, but for me the abbreviation LOL has always meant ‘laugh out loud’. I don’t recall using many abbreviations on paper (maybe RSVP or RTS) so I never encountered LOL until I started using the Internet in about 1995. (Yes, 1995 – I’m not writing a column with geek in the title without some qualification.) Like most of that ilk of abbreviations, it predates SMS and instead originated with Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which is the grandmother of MSN Messenger et al.

Imagine my surprise when I learned during a stand-up show that for some older Generation Xers, there was a time when LOL meant ‘lots of love’ – and I’m sure you can imagine what kind of delightful joke arose from the ensuing confusion. The thing is, so did two different comedians – one from the UK and the other a local stalwart. They both wrote the same joke. Not in as many words, of course, and one used it as an aside while the other developed a short routine around it, but still – the same joke. Both were good.

So here comes the sticky question: who ‘owns’ the joke? There’s no question of joke theft – two people have just written the same joke. I preferred one, but perhaps that was just because I’d seen it first – I might have felt a different way if I’d seen them in the reverse order. If we were talking about music, it would be easy to determine who had published or recorded first, but there’s no such easy mark with comedy. Even if there were, how do you decide what’s so close as to constitute a ‘problem’? As part of their grand finale, the Axis of Awesome ably demonstrate that lots of popular music uses the same basic structure, but hardly any of it is specifically similar enough to warrant law suits or copyright claims.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not suggesting someone has to abandon the joke. There’s no real dispute. Given the two comedians involved – they have very different styles, themes and timeslots, let alone target audiences – I’d be surprised if even twenty other people had heard both versions.  But surely this can’t be the only time this has happened.

Have you had joke deja vu this festival? Let me know – but please, don’t give away any punch lines!

Finished reading this article? You might also like:

• The Uncanny X-Gen With Gavin Baskerville, Carolyn Chillura & Wendy Little
• Guinness Great Debate: Ignorance Is Bliss
• Porthole into the Minds of the Vanquished