MovieChat Forums > The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015) Discussion > Plagiarism?

Plagiarism?

posted 8 years ago by donrob25
2 replies | jump to latest

I happened to stumble on this sketch from earlier this year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148Wx8xNkfU and felt like I had seen it before.

It turns out I had - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S-fcg63l_I .

I tried looking for the writers of both sketches to see if they were the same or there was some explanation that would make this less dodgy. I couldn't find any satisfactory information.

It looks to me like a Late Show writer has not only stolen another writers work but also that of a rival network (NBC) and from a show created by none other than Lorne Michaels.

A lot of the details have changed obviously but the core premise of the sketch is exactly the same. The fact that The New Show is over 30 years old and was a failure, having only a few episodes air before cancellation, really makes it seem like the kind of "perfect target" a hack writer would decided to steal from.

This is pretty disappointing to see.

[–] sandy182 8 years ago

There are a lot of sketches that share the same core premise. Any given week you see late shows make the same joke at least once. Comedy is is a world where ideas spill into one another, whether intentional or not. Over the course of thirty years, I'm sure it's easy to find two core premises exactly alike.

But if you still insist on plagiarism and that a writer might be a hack writer, Monty Python's John Cleese praises in his book that for comedy, the old cliche rings true and successful: good artists borrow, great artists steal.

If you want to hate something, go to imdb.

[–] The_NightRaven 8 years ago

It's a very easy and common joke, I doubt that the Candy one was even the first to do it...
Twilight Zone is very well known for it's twist endings, apart from the fact that they both concerned TZ endings is the only similar thing between them.