Conan O’Brien could become a regular court jester now that a California judge has allowed a little-known comic to proceed with a lawsuit claiming the late-night funnyman stole his jokes.
San Diego-based comedy writer Robert “Alex” Kaseberg says O’Brien and staff writers on his nightly TBS show swiped nearly half a dozen one-liners — from jokes about Tom Brady in the Super Bowl to a wisecrack about Caitlyn Jenner’s sex change.
Kaseberg says he posted the jokes on Twitter and on his comedy blog sometime between December 2014 and June 2015, only to see them later coming out of O’Brien’s mouth during monologues on his “Conan” show, albeit in slightly changed form.
On Friday, California federal Judge Janis Sammartino green-lit Kaseberg’s copyright case to proceed to trial. Using some very unfunny legalese, the judge said she’s convinced the jokes seem suspiciously alike.
“While not exactly identical, the jokes are sufficiently objectively virtually identical to create a triable issue of fact regarding whether a jury would find these objective similarities to be virtually identical within the context of the entire joke,” she wrote.
Lawyers for O’Brien, his company Conaco, TBS and the writers have denied Kaseberg’s claims, saying that he “unsuccessfully tried to leverage his accusations into a job writing for Conan,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Meanwhile, in a deposition from Sept. 16, 2016, O’Brien said he was sickened by the charges.
“Accusing a comedian of stealing a joke is the worst thing you can accuse them of, in my opinion, short of murder,” Conan said. “The notion of stealing someone else’s comedy makes me physically ill. It’s disgusting.”
In defending his writers, O’Brien also noted that pitches for his monologue jokes are done anonymously.
“It makes absolutely no sense to me as a human being that someone — any of my writers . . . would risk their entire career to take someone else’s joke to pad out a monologue and risk everything they have,” he explained.
Lawyers for O’Brien and the rest of his defendants didn’t return messages seeking comment.
“Comedy writers deserve to be compensated and to receive credit for the commercially valuable intellectual property they create, just like everyone else who works to make a living,” said Kaseberg’s attorney Jayson Lorenzo. “This is a victory for comedy writers, especially lesser-known writers. Their works are protected and you can’t use someone else’s material, no matter who you are, without facing liability.”