Why It's Okay for Carlos Mencia to Steal Jokes: Comedy and the Tradition of Appropriation

A small storm has been raging in the comedy world after the Feb. 10th incident between Joe Rogan of NBC's Fear Factor and comedian Carlos Mencia. Rogan is getting attention with strong worded accusations that Mencia steals much of his successful and lucrative material. This type of tumult is nothing new in an industry that operates virtually beyond the protection of copyright laws.

Comedians, for the most part, cling to their material and react emotionally to its unauthorized re-use, but the act of stealing artistic material is a long standing human tradition. Beyond comedy, all art forms utilize appropriation, as it is called politely, to recreate and reinvigorate old ideas. All art uses appropriation in one form or other. To draw from nature, as Leonardo did, is to essentially steal an image from the world.

The greatest of creative geniuses have all been frauds to some extent. The most famous love story of all time, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette, was an unoriginal story, being based on an older poem about the exploits of Tristan and Isolde. Picasso, possibly the most powerful and inspirational painter in two thousand years, is noted to have gained influence for his cubist style from his visits to Africa and exposure to their artistic culture.

All of this was placed center stage during the age of Andy Warhol as outright copies of soap boxes and soup cans crowded the minds of the great artistic thinkers. Warhol offered us an almost quantum-mechanical view of art and the creative process, one where observation held a vital role in creating the nature of that which was being observed. In this slightly extremist viewpoint, theft is impossible, since any re-creation will unavoidably be altered by the context of its retelling.