Oh, Cheggers. His career has taken some pretty unlikely turns (if not hairpin bends) over the years, from acting for Roman Polanski in 1971's Macbeth to acting as stooge to DJ Mike Read in The Saturday Superstore. He followed that with a stint as presenter of Britain's first all-nude quiz show, and even played himself as a rabid anti-semite in Ricky Gervais's Extras. Now he has been cast in yet another unlikely role – as an unapologetic gag thief.
Like far too many stories at the moment, this all started on Twitter. Chegwin decided to use his account, where he has more than 36,000 followers (no, me neither), to broadcast a whole load of gags and one-liners. He claimed that these were either his own work, or traditional gags minted by long-dead comics.
Unfortunately, they weren't. Among the gags retold by the one-time player of pop were identifiable jokes written by a number of contemporary standup stars, including Milton Jones, Lee Mack and Jimmy Carr. And what Cheggers presumably envisaged as a warm-hearted bit of fun has stirred up a sizeable amount of bad feeling within the comedy community. One comedian, Ed Byrne, even took Chegwin to task on Twitter, telling him he was wrong not to credit "working comics" for the jokes he was using.
Now, you could be forgiven for reflexively assuming that the standups are being a little bit precious about this (and that's the line Chegwin has taken, telling his followers with apparent glee that he's managed to upset the "ususal [sic] bunch of jealous comics"). And to be fair, a lot of people have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the concept of intellectual property. But it surely can't be that hard to grasp the principle that whether you're in a building site, an office or browsing on the internet, finding out that someone is passing off your hard work as their own is not exactly on – especially if you're working freelance, as pretty much every comic is.
Interestingly, though, Chegwin's attitude wouldn't have been out of place in the pre-alternative comedy era. Comics who played the working men's clubs and the music halls will tell you that there wasn't the same importance placed on safeguarding your own material. In fact, acts would feel free to draw on gags they'd picked up from other people and incorporate them into their own repertoire without too many recriminations afterwards – although Bernard Manning's oft-repeated put-down of another comic (again, a gag rebroadcast by Chegwin) that he "doesn't tell jokes; he refreshes the memory" suggests that there were limits even then.
The idea that a comedian had outright ownership of his material seems to have taken root in this country once Manning et al gave way to the Ben Elton generation. For the original alternative comedians, simple gag-telling was far less important than presenting a fully-formed original perspective on the world. And if you were trying to offer an audience something distinctive (with all the added hard work that involves) then it became crucial to ensure that your gags were wholly your own.
In recent years, the main victims of plagiarism in standup have been those comics who rely heavily on one-liners and quickfire jokes. For gag thieves, these present the perfect opportunistic crime: they're easy to lift and contain fewer hallmarks of the originator's personality. In 2004, Jimmy Carr threatened to sue Jim Davidson for copying a routine the Channel 4 star believed was his, while the American gagsmith Emo Philips (who I recently interviewed for the Guardian) has fought a never-ending battle against those who cheerfully rip off his work without credit. Philips is currently on the case of Daniele Luttazzi, who used a string of plagiarised jokes as the basis for a successful career in Italy.
Philips has also had his jokes passed on by chain emails, often wrongly attributed to the likes of Peter Kay or John Cleese. And now the Twitter phenomenon has opened up another frontier in online joke theft. You can see why those who tweet standups' jokes might see this as not so different from retelling them to their mates in the pub. But you can surely also sympathise with those comics who are seeing their work transmitted with no attribution on one of the world's largest-growing social networks.
One word of caution, though: coincidence. Comics do come up with similar jokes from time to time, where there's an observable logical absurdity that's struck more than one performer, or a lateral step that more than one act has innocently taken. But that doesn't seem to be what's happened with Cheggers. He looks to have adopted a bunker mentality, refusing to accept criticism online and blocking comics such as Byrne and Simon Evans from his Twitter account. He should count himself lucky that they've been relatively civil, restricting their complaints to 140 characters. When the US comic Joe Rogan felt fellow standup Carlos Mencia was stealing his gags, he gatecrashed a gig and confronted him onstage. At least Chegwin has been spared such public humiliation – hosting Naked Jungle probably gave him enough of that to last a lifetime.
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