1 The Joke Copyright Protective Company
On 25 January 1845, the Lancaster Gazette published an article calling for the immediate formation of a âJoke Copyright Protective Companyâ. The urgent need for its foundation was made plain in the articleâs opening paragraph:
It has been the custom of certain individuals frequently encountered in society (who are desirous of being called âdroll dogsâ, âsmart fellowsâ, âcapital companyâ, âfunny creaturesâ, âagreeable rattlersâ, âwagsâ, and similar appellations) to maintain their reputations by pilfering the jokes of other people, and thus trade on false capital [âŠ] [This] appropriation [has] arrived at such a pitch that no legitimate wit dares make a joke for fear of its being directly taken up.1
In order to protect the rights of âtrue jokersâ, the article proposed a series of rules and procedures by which all jests would henceforth be valued and licenced for retelling. Firstly, the worth of a joke would be determined by âdelivering it to the Clown at Astleyâs [Circus] to say in the ringâ and then measuring the levels of applause and laughter bestowed upon it by his audience. With this valuation in place, the âuse of a joke for an evening [would] be fixed at half a crown, if the utterer [took] credit of it to himselfâ. If the would-be-wag was willing to attribute the jest to its original authorââMarkwell told me a devilish good thingâ or âCarter made me laugh very much the other dayââthen the price would be dropped to a shilling. The âwriters of pantomimes and burlesque extravaganzasâ would be permitted to hire jokes on the same terms, but would receive a discount for bulk orders. Magazine editors and âwriters of newspaper paragraphsâ were warned against any attempt to circumvent this system by attributing new jokes to historical figures and celebrated wits such as âSydney Smith, Sam Rogers, Sir Peter Laurie, and others, when the smart things have evidently never been said by those gentlemenâ. For those who failed to heed these warnings, the penalties would be severe. If a jest was âdamaged by too frequent useâ, âimpaired in the tellingâ, or âkept beyond the eveningâ then the culprit would be compelled to compensate its âoriginal manufacturerâ by repaying the full value of the joke. If caught, an âutterer of a forged joke, or an old one in a new shapeâ would be âdirectly prohibited from telling another for some timeâ. Finally, if they were summarily convicted, then the worst offenders would be âsentenced to see Hamlet performed three times at Covent-garden Theatreâ.
The whole proposal, of course, was itself a joke. Unfortunately for the proprietors of the Covent Garden Theatre, the Companyâs rules were never enforced, and the copyright status of jokes remains ambiguous and contentious to this day. But if these rules had been implemented, the editors of the periodâs newspapers would have been punished often enough to have known Hamlet by heart. Columns of jokes, jests, puns, witticisms and humorous anecdotes were a staple feature of the press during the 1840s.2 As Blackwoods observed in 1848, the country was now being subjected to a âtorrent of facetiĂŠ, a surfeit of slang and punsâ.3 They confidently predicted that this trend would be short-lived. âThe truth is, the funny style has been overdone, the supply of jokers has exceeded the demand for jokes until the word âcomicâ resounds unpleasantly upon the public tympanumâ. They could not have been more wrong. For the remainder of the nineteenth century and beyond, joke columns were a staple feature of the press. They could be found in almost every kind of periodical, but were particularly prevalent in mass-market weekly papers such as Lloyds, popular magazines like Tit-Bits and Answers, the weekend editions of provincial newspapers, and in dedicated comic papers such as Punch, Fun and Illustrated Chips.
While some editors conscientiously purchased jokes directly from authors, many âpilferedâ their gags from other sources and printed them without compensation or even attribution to the âtrue jokersâ who originated them. Indeed, the Lancaster Gazette obtained its piece on joke copyright in precisely this fashion. It appeared on the back page of the paper in a column titled âSelected Anecdotes, &câ, which was composed of miscellaneous paragraphs clipped from other periodicals. That weekâs instalment included a characteristically eclectic range of extracts: a paragraph of political satire and a couple of social jokes attributed to Punch; a witty remark supposedly made by âthe late Dr. Masonâ that had been bouncing around the provincial press for the past few months; an unattributed, and almost certainly spurious, anecdote concerning Louis Philippeâs exile in America; a pithy paragraph clipped from the Illuminated Magazine about the wonders of shopping in London; a piece of Scottish dialect humour supplied by the Dumfries Herald and an incongruous extract from the Gardenerâs Chronicle on the reproductive habits of a parasitic insect.4
The piece on joke copyright was clipped from The Great Gunâa short-lived comic weekly that enjoyed a brief, but spirited, rivalry with Punch.5 Like most comic periodicals, its jokes were widely reprinted by the daily and weekly press; it is possible, therefore, that the paperâs remarks about the need to address joke piracy were not entirely in jest. The Lancaster Gazette generously included an attribution alongside its reprint of the extract, but it is extremely unlikely that they paid the Great Gun a fee for âhiringâ its gag. Nor, for that matter, did the paper demonstrate any awareness of the irony involved in reprinting a joke about copyright without securing the ownerâs permission. This kind of reprinting was deeply embedded in the day-to-day practices of Victorian journalism and, despite occasional complaints from the âownersâ of pirated material, it does not seem to have been regarded by the majority of editors, or their readers, as an objectionable form of plagiarism.6 In fact, while the comic press may have taken exception to such widespread and shameless acts of piracy, the unfettered circulation and reinvention of jests was a vital part of business. As this chapter explores, reprinting and retelling jokes was central, not just to the workings of nineteenth-century newspaper humour, but to a broader Victorian culture of joke-telling.
While the âJoke Copyright Protective Companyâ was nothing more than the whimsical invention of a comic paper, the ideas underpinning its proposals provide a useful framework with which to begin unpacking the place of jokes in Victorian culture and society. Firstly, the humour of the Great Gunâs wheeze rested primarily on the assumed absurdity of applying a rigorous system of copyright protection to something as ephemeral, frivolous and valueless as a joke. Two years earlier, the passage of The Copyright Act 1842 had bolstered the rights of the authors of âbooksâ and âdramatic piecesâ, and thereby reaffirmed the principle (amidst heated opposition from some elements of the publishing trade) that works of this nature could be owned and controlled.7 While it was evidently considered plausible for Dickens to seek the protection of the law in order to curtail the pirating of his stories, the idea of extending similar protections to a single pun or a comic one-liner was assumed, in the Great Gunâs article at least, to be inherently ridiculous.
This distinction prompts us to consider the uncertain place of jokes and joke-writers in the Victorian literary marketplace, and to question whether these texts could ever be âownedâ in the same way as a novel or play. This, in turn, leads us to even thornier questions about the origins of Victorian jokes. Who was responsible for creating jokes in this period? How did they go about performing this work? And, most importantly of all, why did they devote their energies to producing jokes in the first place? The pathway to answering these questions is again illuminated by the regulations of the âJoke Copyright Protective Companyâ, which highlight the different social and cultural contexts in which...