#joke thieves

[oldshowbiz]

Mae West and the Chase and Sanborn Hour accused of plagiarism

[oldshowbiz]

Charlie Chaplin sues Charlie Aplin 

[oldshowbiz]

Eddie Cantor Sued

[oldshowbiz]

The Tony Hendra - Lee Tully Plagiarism Scandal

[oldshowbiz]

Comedians that also use the words ‘oh’ and ‘yeah’

[oldshowbiz]

Timmie Rogers was the first modern African-American comedian to emerge in the post-war period. He wasn’t a political comedian, but he often made subtle references to racism in America. “Watching television is somewhat different for me than for you,” he told a nightclub crowd. “There I am, looking at the end of the Dinah Shore program. She throws the whole world a kiss. And I know that kiss wasn’t meant for me.”

Rogers was livid when he saw Dick Gregory deliver the same line on The Jack Paar Program in 1961.

[oldshowbiz]

Ken Berry’s early stand-up act at Kitty Davis’ Airliner in Miami Beach used a Lord Buckley routine as its closing piece.

[oldshowbiz]

Betty Kean and Lew Parker were a husband and wife comedy team who both had years of major nightclub experience under their belt by the time they teamed up in the late 1950s.  Betty and Jane Kean had been the female equivalent of Martin and Lewis during the late 1940s and early 1950s, playing the most important rooms in the country. Lew Parker was a great sketch comedian who acted in countless “Broadway revues,” the primary place where sketch comedy existed during the 1940s. One of the sketches he famously played in was The Bickersons, the kvetching husband and wife characters created by comedy writer Phillip Rapp, first played on radio by Don Ameche. Parker took the hostile husband to a whole new level. He did the sketch on an episode of The Jackie Gleason Show and the Great One was so impressed he supposedly had his writers rework it and turn it into The Honeymooners.