Comedian smashes audience member's mobile phone, blames YouTube
Lee Hurst, a British standup comedian, decided that a guy in the audience who was texting on his mobile phone was, in fact, recording his jokes so they could be "stolen" and "sold to TV." So he took the phone away and smashed it. During the trial, he railed against YouTube and other places where "stolen" jokes end up.
The comedian claimed in court that there was a growing problem with writers recording rival comics' material so that they could pirate their jokes and sell them to television shows. He claimed that footage of his gigs ended up on websites such as YouTube.TV comic Lee Hurst in court tirade against the joke pirates“TV programmes have writers writing for the performers and they go around to gigs and take the material and sell it to the BBC and ITV and that material is gone," said Hurst, who defended himself.
“You are then accused of stealing your own material. It has happened to me with material shown on national TV that I had already done.
the latest
latest episodes
@Nigel: THIS BLOKE IS TOTAL RUBBISH WAIT HES HEADED FOR ME JUST A S
I have very often taken phones from audience members and spoken with the person on the other end, even made calls onstage, but this is really over the edge and his so-called motivations would fail even as part of a performance piece.
At a Patton Oswalt show in Portland last year he came on for an encore and said he would share some material he was still working on. But because he wanted to release it on an album someday, he asked everyone to please not tape the bit or put it up on YouTube. Of course, there was one jackass who ignored him.
I don't know if the dude ever responded to him; all I heard was the miked side of the conversation, which went like, "Dude... are you recording this? ... I'd like these next jokes to be fresh when I release them ... so do you get why I wouldn't want this to be taped? ... Can you tell me you won't upload them to YouTube? ... You're shrugging, what does that mean? ..."
At which point security came and frogmarched him out, to great applause.
So, has anyone put the footage of him busting this phone up on youtube yet?
A discussion of this on Radio 4 last night included the suggestion that organised gangs of joke thieves go to the Edinburgh Festival every year in order to steal material from up-and-coming performers.
Of course these are stand up comics we are talking about.
And a group of more septic,broken,vain,egomaniacal nut jobs it would be difficult to imagine.
pfft. twat. bet the audience loved the paranoid rantings of this idiot.
If a comic is worried about having their material stolen and used by someone else, surely video would be useful evidence of them performing it originally??
I've only ever seen Lee Hurst on They Think It's All Over on TV back in the 90s; if his stand up as of the same quality as his material on that, I can quite easily believe that the guy was probably bored and texting his mates rather than filming the gig to steal the jokes.
@6 Since you believe these people to somehow be beneath you, that makes it okay to steal their work? Sounds like half of the arguments for file-sharing I've ever heard.
Guess what Lee? People can remember jokes without having to record them
Only the good ones.
Totally obvious this but - has he not considered that anyone who would record his show, and post to YouTube is likely to be a fan? And that people who view the clips on YouTube are going to be that much more likely to buy tickets for future shows?
He should be grateful for the PR. And, as someone else said, for the evidence that the material is HIS.
Expect to see Lee Hurst performing in the back room of a pub to his mum, a dog and three local drug dealers soon.
At least he didn't smash every audience member's head in case they remembered any of his jokes.
Mind you I remember seeing Stewart Lee talking about how the likes of Joe Pasquale send "researchers" to small comedy gigs to nick other peoples jokes. But they probably didn't film them and stick them on youtube, so Lee Hurst is still being something of a plonker.
Sounds like the solution to the "being sued for stealing your own material" problem would be if you're a comedian, record all your performances simply as a "save your ass" procedure. That way when you're accused of stealing material from, say, Jay Leno, you can whip out video from prior to Leno's performance. Of course you then have to prove the video was taken on the date you say it was.
Banning video and audio recording devices from performances isn't going to stop anyone from stealing jokes if that's what they're there for. Simple pen and napkin will suffice.
A friend of mine once got in trouble for "texting" in a strip club. Of course he was really taking pictures, not texting. One of the strippers saw what he was doing, grabbed the phone from his hands, deleted all the photos, then gave it back.
Too bad comedians aren't as smart as strippers.
I love that this guy seems to entirely miss the point of Youtube. If I thought his material was any good, I would go to Youtube to hear it, and then consider attending a performance.
Of course, the best way to avoid having his jokes stolen would be to never perform them in public. TV specials? Too risky! Clubs and festivals? Full of thieves! Clearly this poor man isn't going far enough to protect his precious, original material.
Unfortunately many blues and jazz greats from the 20's-30's didn't record much because they were afraid of other musicians stealing their licks. And so now 80 years later we are missing what could have been some incredible recordings.
Before the magic of technology people could still steal things by memorizing them, or writing them down with these things called pencil and paper.
This comedian obviously lost his mental balance somewhere and just went off. I think the sad fact is if your material is good you're going to get attention, and you're going to have someone steal it. It has been my understanding that comedians have been ripping each other off for decades now, this isn't some new phenomena.
Maybe in part this is a publicity stunt? Because he's not been on telly for a while. And/or a side effect of the anklosing spondylitis he is affected by?
A friend of mine who WAS truly brilliant, gifted, and productive visual artist had some kind of mental breakdown a few years back. Since then, this friend has refused to make any new work for fear that someone will steal the designs.
The mad are the coal mine canaries for where we're all headed.
Mr. Hurst, bitter much?
re #18. Robert Johnson allegedly did his recording facing away from the engineer so that his secret devil tuning couldn't be determined from how he fretted the notes.
@23 "secret devil tuning?"
Isn't that just flatted fifths string-to-string across the fretboard? I'm gonna have to try that one.
"Stealing" jokes goes back to vaudeville, as law scholar David Lange makes clear in a celebrated 1981 law review article on the public domain. W.C. Fields was notorious for borrowing other people's material, and Groucho Marx in his memoirs admits that every comedian steals a few jokes from others en route to inventing his own stage persona and schtick. The "originality" comes in the performance and delivery, and the derivative characters, not in the gag itself. Appropriation is the seed of originality.
Hey! He stole Gallagher's Sledge-O-Matic bit!
@21
I have a mad genius friend who teeters on the same edge... he's terrified to use computers or email because he thinks the government/"someone" will look into all of his stuff. Sad.
Milton Berle always claimed to use stolen- or more often, stale jokes. He also was the owner of a set of file cabinets containing (his count) a million jokes. Theft is as old as property.
There are whole bands out there afraid to release tunes due to Ripoff Fear, or the Unflattering Remix Dread. Those bands don't get heard, either.
The "theft" of jokes is well known, common, and helpful to the stand-up performer. Reproducing another persons entire act (or a substantial portion thereof) is, of course wrong. But at the same time, any comic observation can be made by more than one person: just as you can't sing a song that's never been sung, you also can't make a wise crack that's not been pre-cracked.