Joke theft, a phenomenon predating the art form of stand-up comedy, has entered an uncanny new era.
The basic set-up, for years, was just a comic ripping off a joke and performing it on stage; the infamous mid-2000s Comedy Store stand-off between Joe Rogan and alleged joke thief Carlos Mencia is one of the most famous examples. More recently, with the rise of social media, comics have flagged major influencers and brands for repurposing their jokes as social media fodder without credit. And now, things have gotten stranger, with a proliferation of AI-driven stand-up clips emerging. These clips are not just stealing written material; they’re often drafting off the identity of the comics performing it, copying everything from their voices to their mannerisms and gestures. Many of these posts are racking up millions of views as the real comics behind them struggle to get them taken down.
Among those affected so far are Olivia Carter, Olga Namer and Natalie Cuomo, a trio of New York-based stand-ups.
Cuomo told Deadline that she’s had jokes ripped on Instagram somewhere between seven and 10 times. Seeing a digitally created shell of a person — with her own tattoos — performing her material has felt “violating and super upsetting.”
Carter’s experience with AI has involved seeing a viral one-liner about asking out her personal trainer — a bit she performed on The Tonight Show — ripped off multiple times. At first, she says, the AI avatar “seemed so obviously fake” that she could laugh at what was happening.
“Then, I realized people thought that she was real and that was her joke, and that is what bothered me.”
Up until recently, Carter said, she’d never thought much about how technology could encroach on stand-up — something fundamentally based in the live space. But now that she has been faced with a very real “dystopian” scenario, she feels “helpless because there’s not even a person you could get mad at. It’s just a void.”
Who are the people behind these accounts, one wonders? And how can they be stopped?
The most disturbing instance of theft, for Namer, is the recent ripping off of a joke she spent nine years perfecting. A month after she figured out the right punchline and posted online to around 520,000 views, AI took it to nearly eight million. She realized, then, that although her stand-up is highly personal and based in lived experience, bots could reproduce the surface of the performance without any of the work or history behind it, getting more visibility, without citing their sources.
“This girl who’s a bot has over a half a million followers,” she says, “and it’s like, she could go on tour tomorrow if she was real.”
Namer recently taped this joke for a performance on Comics Unleashed, set to air October 26; she now worries that when people see it, they’ll think that she’s plagiarizing a bot’s material, rather than the reverse.
For comedians, there are several problematic layers to AI-driven IP theft. First, of course, there’s the business impact — the loss of authorship, credit, and revenue from accounts farming their jokes for clicks and a quick buck. For years, posting clips online has been integral to comedians’ process of building an audience and selling tickets to their live shows. So while Cuomo thinks “people will be more protective over their material” going forward, whether comics can successfully migrate their audience to safer platforms, without risking the loss of opportunity for recruiting new fans, remains to be seen.
Currently, going direct to consumer through email lists on platforms like Punchup Live is one option. In the meantime, posting online brings the risk of having jokes ripped off not just once, but an indefinite amount of times, across accounts, and by all kinds of different bots.
“I think comics have always hated posting,” Carter says, “and this is just another reason why we hate it.”
Beyond an economic and artistic violation, though, there’s a more sordid aspect to what’s happening today with AI stand-ups. While there are men who have been affected — George Brett Olson has been one vocal example — the majority affected seem to be women, whose likenesses are often exaggerated or distorted for the purposes of sexualization. Some of these are going so far as linking to AI-related OnlyFans accounts.
As Cuomo sees it, the combination of “objectively funny” and already viral comedic content with a “super sexual,” eye-catching AI persona, is “the perfect recipe” for bad actors to quickly grow online accounts. Whereas it takes comics years to build a following, some AI accounts observed by Deadline have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers and many millions of views within a span of months.
“This is a little dirty,” Namer tells us, “but my friend sent me screenshots.” They were of “creepy old men” responding to the AI bots ripping off her jokes as if they were real, “writing, ‘Oh yeah, I want to tap that.'”
In Carter’s mind, there’s an irony to who is getting targeted for joke theft: “I think it’s funny that it is mostly female comics’ jokes being stolen because people on the internet are always like, ‘Women aren’t funny.’ But it’s like, ‘we’ll take your jokes.'”
The three comedians we spoke with took similar steps in responding to AI posts — reporting them to Meta and encouraging their friends and fans to do the same. Sometimes, posts be taken down, only for others to crop up. Other times, no apparent action would be taken at all. Disturbingly, for now, there seems to be no consistently effective remedy to the situation. Namer went the furthest — having a lawyer friend file a complaint, in an effort to track down the email address associated with the offender — but when the account was suddenly taken down, she found herself right back at square one.
Frequently, AI accounts have blocked both the comedians they’re stealing from and others calling them out — even preemptively, such that the posts aren’t visible to the comics they affect and can’t take action in response through their own accounts.
Asked what she would say to those behind these AI accounts should she meet one of them, Cuomo said she’d emphasize “the humanity” behind the art of stand-up and the great effort that goes into crafting what has been stolen.
Taking a different tack, Carter “would say that I hate you and you’re a bad person.”
Namer would say, for her part, “I devoted my life to this, and you’re doing something not very nice. And you’re also ruining the world.”
The remark came with an addendum:
“I would say if you do steal, could you at least tag me? That would be nice.”