[2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Blame Quintushalls for this.

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Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by GUTCHUCKER »

They are not very similar.
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Tom

Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Tom »

Oh come on, I'm a huge fan of both Zach and Randall, and I'm not accusing Zach of intentionally copying here, but at the very least it has to be admitted that on this one he was beaten to the punch. These two comics are extremely close, and I would like to think that Zach would be mature enough to acknowledge that. I know that he and Randall have worked together in the past, and I would be surprised if he wasn't familiar with all of xkcd - it's hardly surprising that sometimes ideas circulate and crop up again. But honestly, if you are trying to tell me that these two are 'not very similar', then I don't really know what to say to you..

AndR

Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by AndR »

You could start by enumerating the ways they are similar.

"Uhm. There's a cop. And ze's a cop in a strange way."

That's it, I guess? Both comics are so much more than that. The xkcd is based on modern art making no sense. The smbc - on someone becoming an interrogator because of their Nietzschean philosophy being scary.

Tom

Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Tom »

That's disappointing, but ok.

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Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Kimra »

I hope this devolves into fisticuffs.
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Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Edminster »

AndR wrote:ze
yo just fyi english already has a gender-neutral pronoun so we can stop with this aspergian minefield of categorical offense and just use 'they' already

and i mean it's not like it is particularly difficult to describe the character without even mentioning the gender/s or lack thereof if you're so concerned about being 'inclusive' see look watch

"Uhm. There's a cop. And the cop acts in a strange way."

oh wait sorry how ableist of me to use three adverbs in a row which presume you are a sighted person i should have instead typed 'consider the following reconstruction'

oh man and i am being even more of a bigot by referring to any who read and or hear and or have signed into their hand like helen keller this post as a single discrete entity and not even considering the possibility that they are a Multiple System so clearly i can just go off and die like the oppressive cis scum i so clearly am

again, fuck this aspergian minefield of categorical offense

wait shit now i've offended the militant asexuals oh noooooo
Kimra wrote:I hope this devolves into fisticuffs.
well i want to punch somebody* so we're halfway there!

*inasmuch 'a strawman**' counts as a person but fuck knows with tumblr anymore
** or strawwoman, i'm no strawsexist
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Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Sahan »

Oh I was wondering what that ze was, my mind always switches off when people try to justify this stuff anyway. The English language and strict rules of use just have a history of not getting along well together.
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Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Kimra »

I just assumed he had an accent.
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Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Kaharz »

Ed, I'm terribly offended that you insist on using English, the language of global oppression. And now I've had to respond to you in English,* so I am even more offended.

*mostly because I don't speak any other languages fluently. Another clear sign of oppression.**

**Or possibly just a clear sign of my ineptness at other learning other languages.
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Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by GUTCHUCKER »

I hate white people. They're just the worst.
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Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Lurka »

I thought the joke in the other comic was that he picked the wrong attribute. Going with "wisdom" (instead of "intelligence") didn't help his grades at all.

Both are "They made a choice that gave them the knowledge the other choice would have been better," but that's not some new concept.

Retrophrenologe

Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Retrophrenologe »

Actually both just retold a really old joke about god a rabbi and the choice between wisdom and money...

If they did both know that joke, all they did, was make their own visualisation of it in their own style and context. One of them of the gamenerdy kind and one of them with a matrix reference. I like both of them and the original ( and probably the jokes or cracks of wisdom it originated from) Seeing that many people forgot about that old joke they did us all a service in retelling it, because without that jokes tend to die.

Guest

Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Guest »

This is one of the stupidest accusations of plagiarism I've ever read. The comics are about as far apart as two comics exploring the same archetypal scenario or "trope," if you will, could be. The idea that you think it's probable even, let alone undeniable, that Zach's comic is a copy of the other is ludicrous, because the webcomic in question was most certainly not the originator of this type of scenario and shares no more similarity with Zach's comic than any work contemplating a similar scenario. Furthermore, this comic clearly draws more inspiration from The Matrix than any particular webcomic.

lolno

Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by lolno »

Tom wrote:http://xkcd.com/1018/

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3256#comic

This one is kind of beyond dispute really, and I kind of prefer good cop dadaist cop.. ;)
Nope, it's really not beyond dispute. They aren't the same joke, they just make fun of the same real life situation. Which guess what, all humor is stolen from real life. Guess we're all stealing from "god."

Tom

Re: [2014-1-21] Wherein Zach steals jokes from other comics

Post by Tom »

lolno wrote: Nope, it's really not beyond dispute. They aren't the same joke, they just make fun of the same real life situation. Which guess what, all humor is stolen from real life. Guess we're all stealing from "god."
Surely you could say that about literally ANYTHING, then? In those terms it becomes basically impossible to talk about comedians 'borrowing' from each other, since in the end there is a 'real life' referent that supersedes the observation which is made about it. I can steal any joke made by a comic about dogs, CERN, or the Winter Olympics because all of those things exist in real life.

The point is here that both comics make almost exactly the same joke: the 'good cop/bad cop' routine is interrupted by the arrival of a third 'philosophy cop', whose erratic behaviour or confusing speech is in itself more terrifying to the subject of the interrogation than anything that the bad cop could do. This is what I don't really love about Zach's comic, since a real 'bad cop' would be 'Nietzschean' in the sense that he understands the term here regardless of whether he had read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, for example (this is why Dadaist cop works better, in my opinion, as it positions her truly outside the established 'good/bad' duality). What this stresses, however, it that is somehow the language of philosophy itself which is presented as being scary, precisely because it is presented as existing outside the realm of the familiar (the formula of the good/bad cop) - and this is exactly the same in both comics. The joke AND its articulation is substantially the same in both cases. I really don't see how that can be denied, and as I noted above, I would be very surprised if Zach was not aware of this comic of Randall's as they have previously collaborated and XKCD have even hosted some of Zach's work in the past.

To clarify again, I'm not trying to take Zach to task for deliberately stealing material: it is hardly surprising, given the sheer volume of content that both he and Randall (not to mention a massive number of other comparable artists/authors) produce, that ideas circulate, gestate, and reappear in a modified form. There seem to me to be three possible scenarios here. 1) this is an intentional act of plagiarism (I don't for a minute believe that this is the case). 2) that this is an unintentional or unconscious borrowing; Zach has seen this comic several years ago and the idea has recently re-presented itself to him as new (this seems most likely to me). 3) Zach was genuinely unaware of Randall's comic, and happened to arrive at the same idea independently. While this third option isn't by any means impossible (though, as I say, I find it unlikely that someone as into webcomics as Zach would not be familiar with the XKCD back catalogue), it doesn't change anything substantial. Today I could create a machine that heats sliced bread, but that does not mean that anyone would credit me with being the inventor of the toaster.

The reason that I am saying all of this, and that I bothered to point it out in the first place, is not for the opportunity to attack Zach, but in solidarity with him and out of respect. Intellectual copyright is a difficult thing, and I can only begin to imagine how tricky it must be at times to earn your living based on your own intellectual and artistic output. For that to even be possible, audiences need to have some degree of respect for the person who creates the work, and to recognise that what they have produced (whether it is a joke, and image, or a theorem) is their own intellectual property, the product of their creativity, effort, and often years of labour. You can't copyright a joke, but you can hope that people will be decent enough to credit you if you retell it. I don't know, of course, but I imagine that Zach would be very disturbed to see the two comics alongside each other, and (given that these two artists have a previous working relationship) would be the first to point to Randall's comic as an earlier existing version of the same thing. In the same way, I am sure that Zach would hope that the same would hold true if someone inadvertently reproduced a joke he had made in any of the thousands of comics he has produced over the last few years. They represent something close to a life's work, and deserve to be treated as such.

You might think you are defending Zach by saying that anyone can retell a joke because you basically can't copyright it, but you really aren't. You're helping to create a culture in which his role as the creator of his work is valued less, in which his material can be appropriated and reproduced without being attributed to him. You are not on his side.

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