"I thought you'd killed yourself" seems too simple and common of a phrase for anyone to have any ethical kind of claim over it. I personally can't see how it would be unethical to any previous writer to include this phrase in every single script. The only disservice you'd be doing is to yourself and the audience..
I respect comics and it's a shame it's such a tough job, but I'm sorry, this only confirms my suspicion that the comedy world's standards for theft and originality are untenably high.
"That’s not joke theft, but it gets people used to the idea that comedy doesn’t really need to be your own idea." We've been repeating knock-knock jokes and street jokes since the beginning of time. So the idea is pretty ingrained in the public consciousness. I just can't see why it's so unethical to rephrase a joke and make it your own. We tolerate this in music, the visual arts, fantasy fiction. I just can't understand why comedy needs to have such a stricter standard.
If NBC thought the phrase was “simple and common”, they would not have made it the lead joke in the trailer, and if fans of The Bear thought that, they would not have made it the lead joke in all of the “The Bear IS A COMEDY!!!” compilations that I found on YouTube (all the other jokes are just people saying “fuck you”).
I feel like I explained why this is important up top: In comedy, you ARE your jokes. If other people can just take them, they will be paid money and you will not.
I honestly don't know why my feelings need to be impacted by the views of Bear fans or NBC. I live quite humbly, and my income is not large, so I try to empathize with all workers, but in the case of starving professional artists, I can't help but think "just don't be that." One can always work a regular job and do art/comedy in the evenings and on weekends.
> I feel like I explained why this is important up top: In comedy, you ARE your jokes. If other people can just take them, they will be paid money and you will not.
Well, if other people can just take your jokes, then there will be two people telling overlapping jokes. Jumping to the assumption that, whenever anyone shares part of their routine with you, they'll succeed and you'll fail -- that seems to assume that you had no chance of getting any money anyway. You're in a symmetric situation; they can only succeed more than you do if they're better at the job than you are.
The standup comic who taught the general-education standup course I took in university noted that joke stealing was an issue among comics. He also noted that comics had always been divided into "good comics", who didn't steal jokes, and "evil comics", who did. And somehow all this rampant joke theft didn't stop the victims from making money.
Joke theft is a violation of professional courtesy, and it's no more serious than other such violations. Which is to say, no one outside the profession will ever care. Stricter norms on joke theft are good for joke writers, bad for joke performers, and bad for joke consumers. Why would that be a good trade?
In the movie I'm watching, from 2024, one of the characters jokingly says to another person they haven't seen in 20 years, "you look like shit." Ruh roh. We need to get to the bottom of this theft immediately.
It's simple; once Zach Braff has performed a joke, it's important that nobody else should get to experience the joke without having to watch Zach Braff do it. Anything else would throw the universe off balance.
It's the same reason mixed tapes are unethical. If you like a song, and you feel like listening to it, the right thing to do is to listen to the full album it was released in.
I agree, there are some premises that are so simple I have a hard time saying they belong to anyone. Is slipping on a banana peel joke theft? Is not slipping on a conspicuous banana peel joke theft? How about basic observations? How different do they have to be to be considered acceptable? I've been watching a lot of Jimmy Carr recently, so are other people allowed to observe that certain taboo sex acts don't lead to procreation?
That being said, when it comes to music, we do acknowledge who wrote a song originally. And others can do covers, but that's a known thing. I suppose the question is: what's the comedy equivalent of a chord progression, and what's the equivalent of a melody?
You can legally record a song so similar to another song you can tell which original song was being referenced. As long as you have changed the melody.
Yes, there were a few years where the deeply insane Blurred Lines verdict, deplored by virtually all musicians and copyright law experts, really warped the case law. It was the greatest miscarriage of justice in a copyright case that I am aware of, and the judge should be ashamed for not throwing the case out promptly. Or at least for not explaining to the jury that songs cannot technically be copywritten, but only certain elements of songs, including melody and lyrics. Fortunately, that damage has been mitigated in recent years with a few more sane precedents..
You can legally record a song so similar to another song that nobody listening to your performance can tell the difference. Same melody, same lyrics, same accompaniment, everything. This is so important that legislation exists specifically allowing you to do it over the copyright holder's objections.
I couldn't quite follow on whether "I heard you killed yourself" was supposed to be the punchline or the straightline leading up to it. I also couldn't understand the dialogue in the first clip despite repeated rewatchings: it was full of mumbles with some words I could make out.
The first episode of the ill-fated Disney+ series Willow features an entire scene/joke ripped from Young Guns. The whole crew rides their horses off a cliff while "Thraxos Boorman" repeatedly screams a single word in his own language. Soon after, at the bottom of said cliff one of the companions asks "what does that word mean?" Boorman replies "It means stop." The whole bit was lifted from a hugely popular cowboy movie from 1988. When I watched that first episode back in '22 the show was instantly dead for me, and I was not a bit surprised when it was cancelled after one season. Plagiarism is indeed a sure sign of lack of talent.
I had forgotten that Willow line among everything else, but I had immediately placed it as the "whoa" joke. Almost perfect beats.
When is it theft and when is it a callback? I think you have to explicitly put a wink in there and some way for people to find the original if you want it to be a callback.
And what happened to Boston drivers? I went to college in Boston in the 90s and I loved driving there. Everyone was so ruthlessly competent. Uber-aggressive, yes, but they actually knew what the fuck they were doing and kept targeting-quality tracks on every vehicle within 100 feet of them while managing not to make eye contact with anyone. They wrung every passenger-inch-per-millisecond of throughput from their inadequate highway infrastructure. I went back this year, and wow, what a bunch of wusses. They lost their zazzle for sure. People giving you a whole tennis court to merge into because they’re looking at their phone instead of maintaining a safe three inch following distance. People letting you go first at a four-way stop even though you both arrived simultaneously because they’re looking at their phone. People failing to make unprotected left turns through gaps in oncoming traffic at least twice the width of their car because they’re looking at their phone. I honestly can’t fathom what happened.
"This is definitely a traffic-rules-in-Boston situation: When a critical mass of people stop following the rules, everyone else decides “to hell with this”, and pretty soon you have chaos."
Yeah, this was the only problem with the piece. "Ruthlessly competent" is a great way to describe the prototypical Boston driver. Boston drivers were following the rules; the main rule just happen to be "don't be both stupid and weak."
“Thought you’d killed yourself” is not an obvious phrase - there are a million others! “Thought you’d had to go into witness protection”, “thought you’d had to emigrate after getting that girl pregnant” (ok we can workshop these). So that does look like lazy theft.
OTOH I thought the “criminal conspiracy” one was a callback, because it’s a film about a completely incompetent bunch of fools who would like to be as competent as the guys in The Wire but would need two more brain cells to qualify as a vegetable. (That latter is stolen from English cricket captain Ian Botham who would use it on batsmen arriving to bat.)
The joke from The Instigators is an obvious intentional reference to Stringer Bell's line in The Wire, not an attempted theft. They expect the audience to get it.
What is the line between joke theft and just being a hack? For example, saying in an Oprah voice "You get an X, and you get an X, everybody gets an X!" is ubiquitous but seems to be more of a cliché than a theft.
"I thought you killed yourself" seems like a cousin to, "I thought he/she died," which I kind of think is a common question regarding people reuniting after a long time. So I don't know, I don't see it as a joke really -- I wouldn't let it stand as a joke on its own, which is why in this Steph Curry show, the gag is his reply, "I think that was a rumor." And the joke in "Garden State" is that the guy doesn't initially believe that someone is telling the truth about not committing suicide.
When I saw that moment in "The Bear", though, it doesn't even feel like a joke. Since the tragedy is that his brother killed himself, and the specter of his memory haunts Carmy now. So when someone says, "I thought you killed yourself," I didn't laugh, because 1) It's a reminder of his brother, and 2) It's another instance of a non-Fak haunting, and 3) It's another reminder to him that he can't move out of his dead brother's shadow. And maybe 4) the questioner may have Alzheimer's. Which is sort of a joke, though not my favorite.
I don't necessarily think it's joke-theft. But I am not a comedy writer -- I would also be in favor of scrapping a joke because I've heard it before, no matter when, UNLESS it's a God-tier punchline and the joke-teller cannot be found/sourced (which is unlikely). And I have ALSO avoided Twitter for a long time, so there's that. In other words, all of this is moot because I probably shouldn't be writing comedy.
I personally don't have a problem STARTING with "I heard you killed yourself," if only to spin it into another weirder direction, and maybe kill it for good so no one uses it anymore. Like the trope about someone badmouthing someone else, while that person is right behind them the whole time. And then that devolved into pointing out the joke, with the guy admitting, "He's right behind me, isn't he?" Followed by the postmodern postmortem of something like Deadpool where he chastises Cable and then concedes, "He's right behind YOU, isn't he?" And thus, a joke, or joke-adjacent trope, is dead.
In other words, something like-
-"I heard you killed." "Well, I heard YOU died." And allow for riffing on each other's suicide. Dialogue version of the Spider-Man pointing meme, without actually referencing that tired meme.
-"I thought you killed yourself," followed by an elaborate and grotesque description of how the rumor goes around and what the death is like.
-"I thought I killed myself, and that's why I haven't heard from you in a while," an absurdist riff off the whole thing.
-"I thought you killed yourself, and I bought a zoo," using it as a non sequiter springboard into another topic, and meanwhile the character isn't sure if the other guy STILL think he killed himself, or if he thinks he's talking to a ghost.
-"I thought you killed yourself," leading into that character accidentally admitting he robs graves for loose change.
-"I thought you killed yourself, now why don't you make yourself useful?" a dark way of one character admitting he's glad the other guy lived, while reaffirming that same guy's will to live.
I mean, you could take it into a billion directions from there.
I agree with all of this. For starters, "I thought you killed yourself" is barely a joke at all, and isn't even that funny. Each version of the line has something a little extra to package it as a joke. Well, except The Bear, where it just hangs there.
But the context matters. It changes the joke into something else.
OTOH, the taking notes on a criminal conspiracy line is egregious. They even lift the phrase, when it would make more sense to say "taking notes on the crime." Who calls it a conspiracy? Other than Stringer Bell, but that's just bad ass.
Agreed 100% with this. I read something recently about the art of standup that really changed my appreciation for it. Basically, if you're Semisonic, you can write one hit ("Closing Time") and tour forever and keep playing that song over and over, and people will show up. Meanwhile, even mid-level standups have to tour their material once, record a special, and then THROW ALL OF IT AWAY AND START OVER. I think that might be why joke-stealing is so vile - the performance is something, but it's the ability to create the joke that's really the magic and the fact that standups are one fallow season away from falling off the radar makes stealing such a violation.
I loved this essay especially the insight that social media "gets people used to the idea that comedy doesn’t really need to be your own idea."
In a way, it reminds me of a couple of other cultural norms that have been eroded. Remember when the idea of "selling out" was anathema to any self-respecting Gen Xer/early Millennial artist? Or when we thought that the music we loved had an inherent value, and that it was worth owning? Those long-standing truisms have been ground into the dirt, and joke stealing seems to be of a feather. Drat.
If I didn't think I'd be rebuked, reproved, reprimanded and reproached, I'd respond to "We're in a Joke Theft Epidemic" by saying, "You're joking, right?" Or "You must be joking!" Or "This is no joking matter."
I'm not a comedian or comedy writer (obviously) but I play one in Substack comment sections on occasion.
ba dump bump!
Of course, there's absolutely nothing original - or very funny - about any of the above, and I don't know anything at all about creating jokes and comedy other than it seems it would be a very a difficult task to come up with truly new, original stuff. Hats off to those who do! The competition seems to be pretty cutthroat, especially with a select group of high-profile, nationally known politicians horning in on the action of the pros nearly every time they open their mouths these days.
Something that stands out to me is that every newer version of the stolen jokes in the embedded vids were worse than the older version. It's like the writers knew they were stealing and watered down their joke in shame. Not knowing Stringer Bell's most famous line when your a professional screenwriter is professional malpractice, so in some ways stealing is the more likely explanation.
I disagree.- the way they say “taking notes on a criminal conspirammumumble” shows to me it’s a callback. They don’t stage it, they realise it. It’s even possible that’s improvised because why not, it seemed like the film’s plot was.
Thoroughly enjoyed this. A thought: in "The Bear," Carmy's brother, who'd been around running the restaurant, did kill himself, and Carmy, who'd been away for a long time, suddenly showed back up and starting running the restaurant. So my immediate thought was that the joke/incredibly depressing comment, whatever you want to call it, is more about people's estimation of Carmy vs his brother than a ripoff of the joke from "Garden State." In this vein, I'd say it's more of a ripoff of the scene it "Fatso" with Dom DeLuise in which the old lady says to him, "Oh Mr. DiNapoli, I thought maybe it was you who died!" Implying he might be fatter than his recently deceased cousin.
"I thought you'd killed yourself" seems too simple and common of a phrase for anyone to have any ethical kind of claim over it. I personally can't see how it would be unethical to any previous writer to include this phrase in every single script. The only disservice you'd be doing is to yourself and the audience..
I respect comics and it's a shame it's such a tough job, but I'm sorry, this only confirms my suspicion that the comedy world's standards for theft and originality are untenably high.
"That’s not joke theft, but it gets people used to the idea that comedy doesn’t really need to be your own idea." We've been repeating knock-knock jokes and street jokes since the beginning of time. So the idea is pretty ingrained in the public consciousness. I just can't see why it's so unethical to rephrase a joke and make it your own. We tolerate this in music, the visual arts, fantasy fiction. I just can't understand why comedy needs to have such a stricter standard.
If NBC thought the phrase was “simple and common”, they would not have made it the lead joke in the trailer, and if fans of The Bear thought that, they would not have made it the lead joke in all of the “The Bear IS A COMEDY!!!” compilations that I found on YouTube (all the other jokes are just people saying “fuck you”).
I feel like I explained why this is important up top: In comedy, you ARE your jokes. If other people can just take them, they will be paid money and you will not.
I honestly don't know why my feelings need to be impacted by the views of Bear fans or NBC. I live quite humbly, and my income is not large, so I try to empathize with all workers, but in the case of starving professional artists, I can't help but think "just don't be that." One can always work a regular job and do art/comedy in the evenings and on weekends.
> I feel like I explained why this is important up top: In comedy, you ARE your jokes. If other people can just take them, they will be paid money and you will not.
Well, if other people can just take your jokes, then there will be two people telling overlapping jokes. Jumping to the assumption that, whenever anyone shares part of their routine with you, they'll succeed and you'll fail -- that seems to assume that you had no chance of getting any money anyway. You're in a symmetric situation; they can only succeed more than you do if they're better at the job than you are.
The standup comic who taught the general-education standup course I took in university noted that joke stealing was an issue among comics. He also noted that comics had always been divided into "good comics", who didn't steal jokes, and "evil comics", who did. And somehow all this rampant joke theft didn't stop the victims from making money.
Joke theft is a violation of professional courtesy, and it's no more serious than other such violations. Which is to say, no one outside the profession will ever care. Stricter norms on joke theft are good for joke writers, bad for joke performers, and bad for joke consumers. Why would that be a good trade?
In the movie I'm watching, from 2024, one of the characters jokingly says to another person they haven't seen in 20 years, "you look like shit." Ruh roh. We need to get to the bottom of this theft immediately.
It's simple; once Zach Braff has performed a joke, it's important that nobody else should get to experience the joke without having to watch Zach Braff do it. Anything else would throw the universe off balance.
It's the same reason mixed tapes are unethical. If you like a song, and you feel like listening to it, the right thing to do is to listen to the full album it was released in.
I agree, there are some premises that are so simple I have a hard time saying they belong to anyone. Is slipping on a banana peel joke theft? Is not slipping on a conspicuous banana peel joke theft? How about basic observations? How different do they have to be to be considered acceptable? I've been watching a lot of Jimmy Carr recently, so are other people allowed to observe that certain taboo sex acts don't lead to procreation?
That being said, when it comes to music, we do acknowledge who wrote a song originally. And others can do covers, but that's a known thing. I suppose the question is: what's the comedy equivalent of a chord progression, and what's the equivalent of a melody?
You can legally record a song so similar to another song you can tell which original song was being referenced. As long as you have changed the melody.
Or sometimes you can't.
https://mcpherson-llp.com/articles/crushing-creativity-the-blurred-lines-case-and-its-aftermath/
Yes, there were a few years where the deeply insane Blurred Lines verdict, deplored by virtually all musicians and copyright law experts, really warped the case law. It was the greatest miscarriage of justice in a copyright case that I am aware of, and the judge should be ashamed for not throwing the case out promptly. Or at least for not explaining to the jury that songs cannot technically be copywritten, but only certain elements of songs, including melody and lyrics. Fortunately, that damage has been mitigated in recent years with a few more sane precedents..
You can legally record a song so similar to another song that nobody listening to your performance can tell the difference. Same melody, same lyrics, same accompaniment, everything. This is so important that legislation exists specifically allowing you to do it over the copyright holder's objections.
But then you have to pay the copyright holder because you’ve recorded their song.
I couldn't quite follow on whether "I heard you killed yourself" was supposed to be the punchline or the straightline leading up to it. I also couldn't understand the dialogue in the first clip despite repeated rewatchings: it was full of mumbles with some words I could make out.
The first episode of the ill-fated Disney+ series Willow features an entire scene/joke ripped from Young Guns. The whole crew rides their horses off a cliff while "Thraxos Boorman" repeatedly screams a single word in his own language. Soon after, at the bottom of said cliff one of the companions asks "what does that word mean?" Boorman replies "It means stop." The whole bit was lifted from a hugely popular cowboy movie from 1988. When I watched that first episode back in '22 the show was instantly dead for me, and I was not a bit surprised when it was cancelled after one season. Plagiarism is indeed a sure sign of lack of talent.
I had forgotten that Willow line among everything else, but I had immediately placed it as the "whoa" joke. Almost perfect beats.
When is it theft and when is it a callback? I think you have to explicitly put a wink in there and some way for people to find the original if you want it to be a callback.
Kids these days…
And what happened to Boston drivers? I went to college in Boston in the 90s and I loved driving there. Everyone was so ruthlessly competent. Uber-aggressive, yes, but they actually knew what the fuck they were doing and kept targeting-quality tracks on every vehicle within 100 feet of them while managing not to make eye contact with anyone. They wrung every passenger-inch-per-millisecond of throughput from their inadequate highway infrastructure. I went back this year, and wow, what a bunch of wusses. They lost their zazzle for sure. People giving you a whole tennis court to merge into because they’re looking at their phone instead of maintaining a safe three inch following distance. People letting you go first at a four-way stop even though you both arrived simultaneously because they’re looking at their phone. People failing to make unprotected left turns through gaps in oncoming traffic at least twice the width of their car because they’re looking at their phone. I honestly can’t fathom what happened.
"This is definitely a traffic-rules-in-Boston situation: When a critical mass of people stop following the rules, everyone else decides “to hell with this”, and pretty soon you have chaos."
Yeah, this was the only problem with the piece. "Ruthlessly competent" is a great way to describe the prototypical Boston driver. Boston drivers were following the rules; the main rule just happen to be "don't be both stupid and weak."
I was in Boston and witnessed someone changed 4 lanes in 20 feet to make a right-hand-turn. I was impressed! You don't see it much any more.
“Thought you’d killed yourself” is not an obvious phrase - there are a million others! “Thought you’d had to go into witness protection”, “thought you’d had to emigrate after getting that girl pregnant” (ok we can workshop these). So that does look like lazy theft.
OTOH I thought the “criminal conspiracy” one was a callback, because it’s a film about a completely incompetent bunch of fools who would like to be as competent as the guys in The Wire but would need two more brain cells to qualify as a vegetable. (That latter is stolen from English cricket captain Ian Botham who would use it on batsmen arriving to bat.)
One minor quibble:
The joke from The Instigators is an obvious intentional reference to Stringer Bell's line in The Wire, not an attempted theft. They expect the audience to get it.
What is the line between joke theft and just being a hack? For example, saying in an Oprah voice "You get an X, and you get an X, everybody gets an X!" is ubiquitous but seems to be more of a cliché than a theft.
"I thought you killed yourself" seems like a cousin to, "I thought he/she died," which I kind of think is a common question regarding people reuniting after a long time. So I don't know, I don't see it as a joke really -- I wouldn't let it stand as a joke on its own, which is why in this Steph Curry show, the gag is his reply, "I think that was a rumor." And the joke in "Garden State" is that the guy doesn't initially believe that someone is telling the truth about not committing suicide.
When I saw that moment in "The Bear", though, it doesn't even feel like a joke. Since the tragedy is that his brother killed himself, and the specter of his memory haunts Carmy now. So when someone says, "I thought you killed yourself," I didn't laugh, because 1) It's a reminder of his brother, and 2) It's another instance of a non-Fak haunting, and 3) It's another reminder to him that he can't move out of his dead brother's shadow. And maybe 4) the questioner may have Alzheimer's. Which is sort of a joke, though not my favorite.
I don't necessarily think it's joke-theft. But I am not a comedy writer -- I would also be in favor of scrapping a joke because I've heard it before, no matter when, UNLESS it's a God-tier punchline and the joke-teller cannot be found/sourced (which is unlikely). And I have ALSO avoided Twitter for a long time, so there's that. In other words, all of this is moot because I probably shouldn't be writing comedy.
I personally don't have a problem STARTING with "I heard you killed yourself," if only to spin it into another weirder direction, and maybe kill it for good so no one uses it anymore. Like the trope about someone badmouthing someone else, while that person is right behind them the whole time. And then that devolved into pointing out the joke, with the guy admitting, "He's right behind me, isn't he?" Followed by the postmodern postmortem of something like Deadpool where he chastises Cable and then concedes, "He's right behind YOU, isn't he?" And thus, a joke, or joke-adjacent trope, is dead.
In other words, something like-
-"I heard you killed." "Well, I heard YOU died." And allow for riffing on each other's suicide. Dialogue version of the Spider-Man pointing meme, without actually referencing that tired meme.
-"I thought you killed yourself," followed by an elaborate and grotesque description of how the rumor goes around and what the death is like.
-"I thought I killed myself, and that's why I haven't heard from you in a while," an absurdist riff off the whole thing.
-"I thought you killed yourself, and I bought a zoo," using it as a non sequiter springboard into another topic, and meanwhile the character isn't sure if the other guy STILL think he killed himself, or if he thinks he's talking to a ghost.
-"I thought you killed yourself," leading into that character accidentally admitting he robs graves for loose change.
-"I thought you killed yourself, now why don't you make yourself useful?" a dark way of one character admitting he's glad the other guy lived, while reaffirming that same guy's will to live.
I mean, you could take it into a billion directions from there.
Fromtheyardtothearthouse.substack.com
I agree with all of this. For starters, "I thought you killed yourself" is barely a joke at all, and isn't even that funny. Each version of the line has something a little extra to package it as a joke. Well, except The Bear, where it just hangs there.
But the context matters. It changes the joke into something else.
OTOH, the taking notes on a criminal conspiracy line is egregious. They even lift the phrase, when it would make more sense to say "taking notes on the crime." Who calls it a conspiracy? Other than Stringer Bell, but that's just bad ass.
Agreed 100% with this. I read something recently about the art of standup that really changed my appreciation for it. Basically, if you're Semisonic, you can write one hit ("Closing Time") and tour forever and keep playing that song over and over, and people will show up. Meanwhile, even mid-level standups have to tour their material once, record a special, and then THROW ALL OF IT AWAY AND START OVER. I think that might be why joke-stealing is so vile - the performance is something, but it's the ability to create the joke that's really the magic and the fact that standups are one fallow season away from falling off the radar makes stealing such a violation.
I loved this essay especially the insight that social media "gets people used to the idea that comedy doesn’t really need to be your own idea."
In a way, it reminds me of a couple of other cultural norms that have been eroded. Remember when the idea of "selling out" was anathema to any self-respecting Gen Xer/early Millennial artist? Or when we thought that the music we loved had an inherent value, and that it was worth owning? Those long-standing truisms have been ground into the dirt, and joke stealing seems to be of a feather. Drat.
The Comedy Spasm Brought To You By MeowMix. Literal LOL title.
A lot of disagreement here over what's original, but if writers don't want to be replaced by AI, they need to come up with new stuff
If I didn't think I'd be rebuked, reproved, reprimanded and reproached, I'd respond to "We're in a Joke Theft Epidemic" by saying, "You're joking, right?" Or "You must be joking!" Or "This is no joking matter."
I'm not a comedian or comedy writer (obviously) but I play one in Substack comment sections on occasion.
ba dump bump!
Of course, there's absolutely nothing original - or very funny - about any of the above, and I don't know anything at all about creating jokes and comedy other than it seems it would be a very a difficult task to come up with truly new, original stuff. Hats off to those who do! The competition seems to be pretty cutthroat, especially with a select group of high-profile, nationally known politicians horning in on the action of the pros nearly every time they open their mouths these days.
Something that stands out to me is that every newer version of the stolen jokes in the embedded vids were worse than the older version. It's like the writers knew they were stealing and watered down their joke in shame. Not knowing Stringer Bell's most famous line when your a professional screenwriter is professional malpractice, so in some ways stealing is the more likely explanation.
I disagree.- the way they say “taking notes on a criminal conspirammumumble” shows to me it’s a callback. They don’t stage it, they realise it. It’s even possible that’s improvised because why not, it seemed like the film’s plot was.
Amy Schumer is worth $25 million.
The Aristocrats!
Thoroughly enjoyed this. A thought: in "The Bear," Carmy's brother, who'd been around running the restaurant, did kill himself, and Carmy, who'd been away for a long time, suddenly showed back up and starting running the restaurant. So my immediate thought was that the joke/incredibly depressing comment, whatever you want to call it, is more about people's estimation of Carmy vs his brother than a ripoff of the joke from "Garden State." In this vein, I'd say it's more of a ripoff of the scene it "Fatso" with Dom DeLuise in which the old lady says to him, "Oh Mr. DiNapoli, I thought maybe it was you who died!" Implying he might be fatter than his recently deceased cousin.