Topic: The craft of comedy
I had a joke-in-progress about the KFC Classic Bowls. I'e done it two or three times, and it still needed major changes, but I was determined to make it work. Then, last night on Comedy Central's Last Laugh, Patton Oswalt did a joke (a good one - pretty much all of his jokes are good) about KFC Classic Bowls that was basically the same premise as mine. Strangely, we even both mentioned loading the ingredients into a gun and shooting them into somebody's mouth. So, to make a long story short: that joke is gone. I've already done it on stage, so if I wanted to be stubborn I could argue that I did it first, but I don't see the point. That's his joke now.
The moral of this story is this: this happens all the time. When I started doing comedy, I had no idea this would happen so often, but it happens a lot. So, new comedians should be aware: you will unknowingly make the same observation as somebody else. It will happen more than once. When it happens, try to determine to whom the joke belongs, and maybe whether the jokes are different enough to coexist, and maybe you can come to some sort of agreement with the other person. But a lot of the time, you will just have to throw the joke away. It sucks, but get used to it.
