Who invented Calculus? Isaac Newton is what I was taught but depending on where you lived you might just as easily been told the story about how Calculus is a gift to the world conceived by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Shockingly, both stories are true.

That’s right: We had two people coming up with the same specific idea at the same time, from opposite ends of the world with a whole ocean between them. And both of them fairly believed that the other one ripped them off.

It actually happens a lot. Two companies come out with almost the same product as each other. From Hollywood, The Prestige and The Illusionist come out at the same time. We assume it’s some form of corporate espionage. Even the biggest fans of the Jungian concept of the Collective Unconscious have to question it sometimes.

Sometimes a solid idea is so good that lots of people will think of it. And as Joseph Campbell explained in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, there are archetypes that persist in human culture. He argues that stories and plot structures resonate with us because they all have the same elements. He described a structure called “The Hero’s Journey” and you’ll find this structure in everything to ancient Greek myths to The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars.

Sometimes an idea is so good that it’ll come to more than one person. Sometimes and idea just has it’s time. Sometimes an idea has been with us all along. And sometimes we evolve each other’s ideas. For example:

Jackson Pollock was an Abstract Expressionist known for “drip painting,” and he’s one of my favourite artists. Most people think he invented this technique but they’d be very wrong.

That honour actually goes to a Ukrainian artist named Janet Sobel. She never got as famous as Pollock, but she did it first. Pollock saw her work and was inspired by it, vowing to learn and master her style.

For the record, Jackson Pollock never “stole” her idea and told readily told people how Sobel’s work inspired him. He just happened to get more famous, mostly through his association with the Abstract Expressionist movement (my favourite) which gained momentum for political reasons as much as anything else. Art historians and critics have always known that Sobel did it first but generally agree that Pollock did it better.

By now you might be wondering whether I’m going to mention comedy at all. Fear not: This stuff has everything to do with comedy.

Issues about ownership, intellectual property and idea provenance are such a massive part of stand up comedy that it’s actually shocking I haven’t tackled the subject here before.

We’re living in an age where authorship matters and intellectual property is the most valuable kind. For a Comedian, it’s the only kind or property. Lots of professions have something tangible to value their business by (their bricks-and-mortar residence, their stock, their tools, their manufacturing plants, etc). Comedians only have their material, their jokes.

Authorship wasn’t always as important as it is now. Once upon a time, a performer like Elvis would get the fame and money while the songwriters died poor and anonymous. Then the Beatles flipped it, deciding not to perform on stage anymore an becoming the first ever “studio” band, insisting that payment goes primarily to the writers. Then they took it a step further and started a record label, becoming the first performers to take control of the publishing. (IMHO The Beatles don’t get enough credit for transforming the industry in that respect).

Comedian Stewart Lee recently recalled a time when it was common for comics to take and use each other’s material. If you said something funny in front of a more established comic, they might say “Nice. I’m using that” and you just had to be cool with it.

Around that time Yakov Smirnoff, a Ukrainian comedian in America would describe the comedy scene in the Soviet Bloc: Originality was forbidden. Comedians had to select their material from a book of state-sponsored jokes or go to jail. Russian comedy had all comedians using the same jokes, only being judged on how well they performed them.

Things have changed a lot. Now, originality is prized much more than performance and using another comics’ jokes is considered an unforgivable sin.

The biggest scandals in my lifetime include Carlos Mencia, Bill Cosby, Robin Williams (we all love Robin but he was famous for it back in the day), Dennis Leary (lifting Bill Hick’s whole act as well as his jokes), Dane Cook (from Louis CK), and Amy Schumer (along with her whole writing team). There’s more, and there always will be.

Occasionally we’ll see a comedian say something that feels familiar. It’s inevitable that this will happen from time to time. Sometimes this is blatant theft, completely intentional. And sometimes it really isn’t.

Sometimes two people genuinely have the same idea without knowing anything about each other, Calculus-style.. Comics call it “Parallel Thinking,” even though the phrase means something completely different outside of comedy.

And sometimes it’s Cryptomnesia. Cryptomnesia is when you don’t remember that you saw or heard it already and figure it’s your idea.

Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a tune, a name, or a joke; they are not deliberately engaging in plagiarism, but are experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.

This happens a lot more than you might think. It’s happened to me. I once listened to an older Gary Gulman album and heard him tell a joke I’d been using. Shit. I’d never steal from him, but I know for sure I must have heard it because I’ve listened to all of his stuff several times. I genuinely thought I wrote it myself but it was a case of Cryptomnesia.

And sometimes it happens to us. Recently I was outside smoking in the car park with another comic before a show. He told me he’d written a bit about a certain theme. I told him I also had a chunk about that premise, and we compared notes to make sure we weren’t going to tread on each other’s jokes.

We were both satisfied that aside from the topic our routines had nothing in common. We are very different from each other in style and technique. This was a good-faith act and mutual respect between two peers who both pride ourselves on our creativity and writing ability.

Still, 30 minutes later I heard my words coming out of his mouth on stage. My words, verbatim. It was weird. He caught himself halfway through it and stopped, returning to his regularly scheduled programming.

Things like this can happen. I take a lot of the blame for what happened. I had no business filling up his head with my stuff right before an important gig. Also, alcohol was a factor. I wasn’t mad at all and found the whole thing interesting.

I know some comics might go all psycho over it but I’m not one of them. I know this guy and he’s not any kind of joke thief. Like I said, this comic takes his creativity and writing as seriously as I do.

I did expect we’d have some kind of chat about it, acknowledge what happened and move on, But here’s where I got the reminder that this whole issue is a very sensitive topic to all comedians no matter what side of it they’re on. When he didn’t raise it, I stupidly brought it up during an argument about something else and he… escalated the conversation.

That’s about the most polite way I can put it. No names are mentioned here, and I don’t want to talk about local Comedy politics. My point is that authorship and ownership are a serious matter to comedians, even ones who claim to be apathetic about everything else.

I understand Cryptomnesia. It’s going to happen sometimes. A lot of prominent and respected comics say they refuse to listen to anyone else’s stand-up for fear of accidentally repeating something… so you know it’s a thing.

I worry too, but I love stand-up and not being able to enjoy it anymore is too high a price for being a comic, so I’ll keep listening to other people’s comedy. Also, I think the secret to originality is knowing what else is out there. How do I know I’m not following someone else’s steps?

Because duplication can happen by accident. Someone else might be discovering “comedy calculus” at the same time I do. If an idea’s good, there’s a reasonable chance that more than one brain will have it.

When I make something, there’s every chance that someone out there is making something the same, or already has. What do you do with that? And does it matter anyway? Do we fulfill our artistic drives, or are we just supposed to submit to the inevitable sense of Vemödalen?

Oh yeah, since we’re exploiting the fancy words today, here’s vemödalen:

n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

Yes; When you write jokes, you will experience vemödalen and the only thing you can do is say “Fuck it” and keep going. Write another. And another. Write enough of them and eventually you’ll develop something you’ll be known and respected for.

Originality wasn’t always the gold standard of comedy, but it is now. Sometimes that doesn’t feel fair, but it is. Sometimes I tell myself that I might have come up with some of the ideas Lenny Bruce got famous for and that his privilege was being born first.

But then I remind myself that he had to be the pioneer and go to jail several times so that I can stand on his comedic shoulders when I do my thing. That’s when I tell myself to stop being so petulant and write another fucking joke so that I can eventually develop something that people know is mine, no matter who recites it.