FEBRUARY 2026: Joke Stealing

Am I doing it? Probably.

There are a new bunch of copy-cat newbies on the scene every year. I think everyone deserves a buffer of two years to figure out that they shouldn’t be doing that. But that’s it!

What’s stealing, what’s borrowing until I find my voice and what’s just lazy writing? There are a lot of differing opinions about this and not everyone will agree with mine but this is my newsletter.

I’ve had someone accuse me of stealing their joke before. Did I? Don’t think so. They are pretty bad at comedy and I doubt I would copy the test of a D student who works on cruise ships now.

But over the years I have stolen a bunch from comics better than me. It’s how I learned how to do it.

Me, during my Tim Minchin phase*

I would watch the headliners and then try to figure out the mechanics of their jokes. The beats, the rhythm and how that could work in my voice for my ideas. Is this theft? Kinda. But I think it’s ok, while you’re still learning how to get an audience to laugh.

I was the only woman on most of my gigs, so I had to repurpose every move and invert every skill and I think that made it easier to not straight up steal someones shit. But if I had started comedy today I don’t know? Maybe I would be guilty of the things that really piss me off now.

Here are the types of comedy theft that I personally hate the most

Straight up theft

Word for word theft is so rare that I have only ever seen it a handful of times in the 10 years I’ve been doing comedy and never by anyone that’s making money. But yeah, don’t do it.

Stealing Someones Premise

This one is fucked and probably the most common. Premises are so hard to come up with. Connecting ideas, finding patterns that haven’t been explored yet. But everything’s been explored already Steph, shut up. I know, but you are still coming up with an idea by looking at the world and interpreting it.

If someone has a great joke, 6 months later 10 other people have their versions of it. It’s so hard to police and how do you prove that you didn’t all come up with it independently? You can’t, but you just know. The worst part of this type of theft is that they don’t steal the punch line, they steal the set up. The set up is the hardest part. Fixing a set up is way harder than writing a punchline. Don’t steal that. Fuck you!

I know a lot of comedians that don’t even think this is theft, in fact this is how they write. Like they openly admit it. Some go as far as to teach newer comics to write like this. They watch comedy, hear what other comedians say and then think “what would my version of that be?” No! That is not writing. That is summarising. Writing comes from life, not from other artist’s interpretations of life.

Ken Done looked at Sydney and painted it in brightly coloured, geometric shapes. You’re looking at a Ken Done painting, picking slightly different shapes, sticking it on the fridge and calling yourself an artist.

Don’t write like this.

Stealing someones cadence

This is so common in a scene. There is a comedian with a unique tone that has a wonderfully quirky quality to it and everyone just pinches it. Sam Campbell’s and Ben Kochan’s cadences continue to dominate the open mics in my area. We also have a few Bill Burrs and Chris D’Elia’s too. You can tell someone is ripping off someone else’s cadence because as soon as they come off stage they don’t talk like that anymore. While studying singing, I was told to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to remove any affectations from my natural singing voice. I think we should do this for comedians too. If you are doing it and you think you are getting away with it, you are not, everyone’s noticed.

Stealing someones POV

Do you want to get laughs like Dave Hughes? Just be an angry man up there. Who cares if you’re actually a mild mannered lawyer that still has the tag on their plaid shirt they bought for this gig? I care. Find your own POV. The reason famous comedians are famous is because they nailed their own POV.

It’s also, long term, gonna be a real pain in the ass if you have to write from a perspective you don’t have. How are you gonna generate new material as quickly as you need to when you’re not actually mad at the queues at the bank? Why write yourself into a corner? Trust that you have your own POV and take the time to find it. I would suggest that you do a clown course, be over 35, and do stand up comedy for at least 10 years.

Stealing someones bag of tricks

The get out of jail free lines, the slight giggle, the weird noise they make with their nose that makes a room pop opened. These are not up for grabs. Find your own version of them but don’t take other peoples. Comedians do decades of shitty rooms to develop their bag of tricks and you can’t have them. Spend 20 years doing shitty gigs and develop your own.

Here are the types of comedy theft that I personally don’t care about at all

Public Domain gags

Is it written on a T-shirt you can buy in Bali? Then it’s not your joke. It’s not anyones joke anymore. No one stole it from you, it was never yours in the first place.

Crowd work

The “the male in the heterosexual couple didn’t know how long they have been together, that’s crazy”, The “wearing sunglasses/a cap inside, you idiot” and so on and so on. These are valueless nothings. They are just words. Who cares. If you do these moves and can still live with yourself then you can have them (I do them).

Room Work

The ‘I told the booker I wasn’t going to headline this room until (enter weird stuff in the room here)’ move. It always works and it’s everyones.

In conclusion:

There is no way to protect your work in standup comedy so you can steal whatever you want and no one can really do anything about it. But the comic you stole it from will hate you forever and has probably told everyone you stole it, so live your life.

Thanks for reading,

(Also I don’t have payments set up, so while I know Substack prompts you to donate, Please don’t, I don’t know how to turn it off. I can’t access the money and this is a passion project for me that I might wanna stop whenever I feel like it. Thank you to all of you that tried to donate though. I’m stoked you would pay for this nonsense.)

*this was actually for a halloween show. I sang ‘inflatable you’ without adding anything to it except much worse piano playing.

Steph.