Plagiarism in the public sphere is nothing new. Luminaries from Stephen Ambrose to Martin Luther King, Jr., have been accused of stealing other people's creative ideas. Stand-up comedians, though, have not generally been held to the same ethical standards as other public figures. A notoriously derivative genre, comedy has bred a culture of thievery as far back as 19th-century vaudeville. In the 1950s, one-line legend Milton Berle poked fun at his own thievery, once saying that a comedian made him laugh so hard, "I nearly dropped my pencil."
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