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TAKE MY JOKE, PLEASE Dane Cook, alleged joke poacher

Joe Rogan, host of Fear Factor and formerly of The Man Show, says he experienced this firsthand with a routine he spent months developing on the topic of tiger fucking. When Rogan saw a friend he'd performed with many times recycle his bit on Comedy Central after simply changing the tiger to a rhino, his claws came out.

The friend? Future megastar Dane Cook.

According to Rogan, when he angrily called to demand an explanation, Cook promised to drop the joke. Rogan considered the matter settled. Two weeks later, he caught Cook at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles performing yet another bit of his, which Rogan had already released on a CD. Rogan, a full-contact Tae Kwon Do champion, says he confronted Cook on the spot. "I said, 'What the fuck are you doing?'" the comic recalls. "'You know that's my bit! You heard me say it! What the fuck makes you think you can take my material and do it onstage?'"

Hicks's friend Colleen McGarr saw Leary perform an uncomfortably familiar set. "I was aghast. To me it was Bill's material done in a shabby, humorless way, but shocking enough that people would respond to itRogan isn't the only one who has accused Cook of lifting material. Another veteran comic recalls seeing Cook performing one of his very physical routines at the same club. "I go, 'Don't do that bit,'" says the comic, "and [Cook] goes, 'Oh, sorry man. I won't do that bit.' But he did it plenty of times after that."

And not long ago, comedy-oriented message boards and blogs such as A Special Thing, Redban, and Cringe Humor were jammed with posts claiming that Cook had ripped off comedian Louis C.K., who starred in HBO's recently canceled Lucky Louie. Posters noted that three bits from Cook's Retaliation—"Struck by a Vehicle," "Itchy Asshole," and "My Son Optimus Prime"—sound remarkably similar to "Guy on a Bike," "Itchy Asshole," and "Kid's Names," all of which are featured on C.K.'s CD Live in Houston.

Listening to the two albums, there's no denying certain similarities. "Guy on a Bike" and "Struck by a Vehicle" both wonder how to warn someone in a split second that they're about to be hit by a car. C.K. yells "Bad thing!" while Cook sputters "Uuuuuuuhh!" In "Kid's Names" and "My Son Optimus Prime" both men discuss giving children weird names, with C.K. choosing "Ffffffffffffff" to Cook's "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr."

Is it possible Cook wrote his bits without ever hearing C.K.'s? Parallel thinking—when comics write the same or similar jokes independently—is extremely common. Comedians view the world through a similarly honed comic prism and often produce identical premises or punch lines. When the pedophilic priest scandals broke, for example, comics all over New York City riffed on it with variations of "Hey, I was never abused—what was wrong with me?" lines. None of them appeared to have cribbed the joke; it was simply the obvious gag.

The notion that parallel thinking explains the case of Cook and C.K. seems far-fetched. But for his part, C.K. has tried to downplay the issue. "Okay, this kid is stealing from me. And making lots of money. Three bits on one CD," he wrote on A Special Thing's bulletin board in 2005, adding, "Just so you know, guys, I'm not going to do anything about this.... I'm not going to court over a bit called 'Itchy Asshole.'" The controversy did little to hurt Cook, whose Retaliation was the best-selling comedy album since Steve Martin's A Wild and Crazy Guy.

Other comedians agree there's little upside to accusing colleagues of theft. "My ex-boyfriend had a great philosophy about joke stealing," says Comedy Central favorite Lisa Lampanelli. "'Write more." If you're gonna be a freakin' baby and whine that somebody stole your jokes, guess what? You can write more."

Accusations of comedic skulduggery have also dogged Denis Leary, who has spent much of his career denying that he borrowed his act wholesale from Bill Hicks, the edgy, anti-establishment legend who died of cancer in 1994. Critics have long cited a laundry list of alleged similarities between Leary's 1993 album No Cure for Cancer and Hicks's earlier work, from Leary's angry, chain-smoking persona to specific jokes about tobacco, health nuts, and lame bands. The charges grew so widespread that they inspired a scathing joke among some of Hicks's friends that Leary had become famous only because, well, there's no cure for cancer.

Colleen McGarr, a onetime talent coordinator for the Montreal Comedy Festival and a close friend of Hicks's was backstage at the fest in 1991 when she first saw Leary perform what seemed to her an uncomfortably familiar set. "I was aghast," says McGarr, who later became Hicks's manager and fiancée. "To me, it was Bill's material done in a shabby, humorless way, but shocking enough that people would respond to it."

"I was shocked that [Leary] could still work in Boston," says Rogan, who claims he has also watched Leary recycle old bits by Ray Romano.

But other comics who were close to both men dispute the charges. "I think it's all a little exaggerated," counters Comedy Central regular Nick Di Paolo, who also knows Leary from the Boston scene. "Before anyone knew who Bill Hicks was, [Denis] was funny and original, and he always did the smoking stuff."

Indeed, when comparing No Cure for Cancer with Hicks's material from that time, the case seems murky. There are several similar jokes, including a riff on the irony that John Lennon was murdered while lesser talents were allowed to live. But in this case the argument for parallel thinking seems plausible. Even McGarr—who says that Hicks himself held no animosity toward Leary—now feels less sure about any wrongdoing. "You listen to the albums back to back, and it's complicated," she says. "Denis did lot of things in comedy after No Cure for Cancer. So, it's not like it's a continuing thing." (Interestingly, in her biography on Hicks, American Scream, Cynthia True reported that Hicks himself was accused by Sam Kinison of stealing Kinison's act.)

While the genial, hardworking Leary is generally liked and admired by most of his peers, Comedy Central star Carlos Mencia is almost universally reviled. According to Rogan, the famed Comedy Store in Los Angeles has even instituted a Mencia early-detection signal similar to the Improv's for Williams, though considerably less high-tech. "Every time he walks in, the guys in the cover booth just start yelling 'Mencia's here!'" he says with a laugh. (Both Mencia and Leary declined repeated requests for comment.)

Nick Di Paolo claims the Comedy Central star also swiped material from him, and notes that "every Latino comic wants to kill him."

One in particular is sitcom star George Lopez, who told Howard Stern last year that Mencia stole 13 minutes of his act for an HBO special, inspiring him to pay Mencia a personal visit. "I just had enough," Lopez recalled. "So one night at the Laugh Factory, I just picked him up and slammed him against the wall."

Unfortunately, there's generally no accountability for comic larceny—even when the culprit cops to the crime. In his book Gasping for Airtime, Jay Mohr owns up to an unusually high-risk robbery: When he was a cast member on Saturday Night Live, Mohr watched popular New York comedian Rick Shapiro do a set in a local club, transcribed it word for word, and submitted it as his own work for a sketch that made it to air. Several weeks later, after Shapiro sued Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels showed Mohr a tape of Shapiro doing the bit and asked if he had seen it before. Though Mohr denied it, the show settled with Shapiro for an undisclosed sum. Mohr, however, suffered no repercussions at all.