It is much easier to make
babies laugh than it is to bring grown-ups to laughter. It is even much harder
to make a living out of stand-up comedy. Nonetheless, the Ugandan audience in
particular has a soft spot for entertainment and has so far been faithful to
the stand-up comedy branch of entertainment since it became popular only a few
years ago. Even from a Law and Economics perspective, the transaction costs are
low for the comedians involved so they attain their efficiency moderately
quickly.
As we laugh over these jokes,
what comes to the mind of an intellectual property advocate is: what does it
take to process these jokes? Considering that copyright law protects the
expression and not the idea, we would right away be looking at any written
scripts of the jokes before they are relayed on stage as well as recordings of
the jokes as they are given. This is the material form that necessitates
protection.
However, challenges abide when
it comes to tracking ownership through expression. The questions posed are:
Whose joke was it in the first place? Is Pablo the author of his jokes or does
he pick them from some other source? Originality in composition of jokes is not
something that comes about easily for many of the artists in this industry and
it is noted that many of them repeat the same jokes over and over again with
different audiences. If they cannot successfully lay a claim for originality,
then it would be harder still to protect their comedy expressions as
Intellectual Property. This is where copyright protection in stand-up comedy
loses its effectiveness.
It is also harder to protect
stand-up comedy where most of the jokes are concentrated on particular themes.
For instance, most themes among Ugandan stage comedians focus on sex and
ethnicity. The originality loses itself somewhere in the process of the
expression making it difficult to rely on copyright protection for the joke.
It would be expected that the
U.S has a more efficient copyright protection over stand-up comedy which is a
very lucrative business but the same challenges towards such protection are
evident in this country. Some comedians rely on taking matters under their own
hands rather than rely on legal inefficiencies. Comedian George Lopez once
confessed to having grabbed fellow comedian Carlos Mencia at the Laugh Factory
comedy club, slammed him against a wall and punched him in retaliation for
joke-stealing. But is violence or vigilantism the solution?
The Laughs may not be for
free, but Ugandan copyright law has no answers either – at least for now. It
would be interesting to know what other copyright lawyers think about legally
protecting Stand-up comedies, otherwise – the joke’s on us.
