Hi there, Bland Hack aficionados. We’re snowed in here in Atlanta, or Hothlanta as clever Star Wars enthusiasts are calling it. But fear not, a new skit is in the pipeline and should be ready for your viewing pleasure come February!
In the meantime, I submit, for your curious approval, a clip from Family Guy. Normally, I would never do such a thing, not being the biggest fan of the show, but just watch:
Pretty uncanny, right?
That clip is, pretty much entirely, the same joke and concept of our skit, The Other Brontë Sister. Now, I’m not at all saying they stole our material or anything like that. I think this actually points to a concept I read about recently called the Adjacent Possible.
The idea is that given a certain number of elements and circumstances, the set of potential outcomes is the adjacent possible. In Steven Johnson’s new book “Where Good Ideas Come From,” he discusses this as well as the phenomenon known as the multiple discovery, wherein over the course of history, various people invent the same thing at roughly the same time, independently of each other. They just weren’t aware of it.
Now, with the advent of the internet, if you have an idea, you can just Google it and see if it’s ever been thought before. It’s kind of extraordinary. A new idea, be it a joke or a pun or an invention or whatever, may have been lingering out in the realm of human thought well before you ever even thought of it. It’s amazing and it sucks, because you may have thought your idea was the most original thing you’d thought in a while, and there it is on someone’s blog three years ago. Or the more likely outcome is that SNL/The Simpsons did it.
With comedy, it’s sort of strange territory, as joke thievery is not something to proclaim lightly. But thinking back to the idea of the adjacent possible, given a set of thoughts, ideas and words, it’s no wonder that the same jokes can crop up again and again.
Sure, it stings a little to get scooped by Family Guy, as some writer on their staff got paid to write that joke, while we spent several months and our own money working on our version of it. But at the same time, it provides a bit of satisfaction and validation. It reminds you that great minds think alike, and funny minds will probably do something similar given a set of ideas and circumstances, such as the Brontë sisters, a tendency for historical humor, and a penchant for the ridiculous.
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germain says: let's have a conversation about this....
Matt says: to get a ton of views on youtube you need one thing...tits. Well actually that's 2 things....
Germain says: Hey Jamie, that book sounds pretty interesting, are you done with it yet? hint,hint
I'm just finishing up What Technology Wants, which I think touches...
Hey Jamie, that book sounds pretty interesting, are you done with it yet? hint,hint
I’m just finishing up What Technology Wants, which I think touches on some of the same topics. It’s about how technology and ideas evolve much in the same way that life has evolved. It makes the point that both life and technology are part of a universal drive towards complexity, etc.
Comment by Germain on January 27, 2011 at 2:12 pm