Oh Yoshi, They Don't Believe Me

A while back, I went to see a very funny, very raw stand-up comedian named Yoshi at the Westwood Brewing Company. Today, my roommmate Nathan uncovered this article in the Boston Herald, about how a recent episode of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" may have ripped off an old Yoshi joke:

Yoshi Obayashi, an L.A.-based stand-up comedian, saw something a little too familiar in the “Kamikaze Bingo” episode, which first aired Oct. 16 and remains available via Comcast On Demand.

The premise: David makes fun of his friend Yoshi once he finds out Yoshi’s elderly father was a former kamikaze pilot who didn’t die in World War II. Cringeworthy hilarity ensues, including a failed suicide attempt by Yoshi.

Here's what's strange...I've seen Yoshi do his own kamikaze pilot joke and I watched the Bingo episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," but I didn't notice the joke was ripped off. Maybe because it's one of the very few jokes in Yoshi the Comedian's catalogue that doesn't include topics like baby rape or assaulting the handicapped, so I just plum forgot about it.

The real-life Yoshi, 36, has opened the majority of his stand-up gigs for years with a similar bit. A Seattle Times article in 2000 even quoted his joke: “My grandfather is a retired kamikaze pilot. Obviously not very good.”

Unfortunately, it seems that Yoshi can't do his kamikaze pilot joke any more, because people think he's ripping off Larry David. It reminds me of the Dylan documentary No Direction Home. An old folk singer is upset that Dylan ripped off his arrangement to "House of the Rising Sun" during Bob's first-ever professional recording. He couldn't perform it any longer because people would accuse him of ripping off Dylan.

Of course, soon after, The Animals re-recorded Dylan's stolen version of "House of the Rising Sun" and made it a huge hit. So, now, Dylan can't perform "House of the Rising Sun" without people thinking he ripped it off.

I think the moral of the story is that there are no new ideas out there, so anything you say or do has probably already been done before. I'm sure Yoshi wasn't the first guy to make a wiseass comment about a kamikaze pilot who has survived the war...He just happened to get there before Larry David:

David, who has a home on Martha’s Vineyard, said he had never heard of nor seen Obayashi and picked the name Yoshi for the storyline because it sounded funny.

“It’s just unfortunate,” David said. “It’s totally bizarre. It’s completely bizarre.”

But all a coincidence, he says.

“I should call the guy,” David said.

So he did.

Yeah, this is a really poorly-written article. I ought to be writing for the Boston Herald if this is as good as they can do. I mean, you should never ever end a news article with "so he did." What is this, a fucking Paddington Bear story?

"Then, Mrs. Dewberry asked if Paddington would like to go and get some crumpets from the conservatory...So, he did. The End."

I believe David. I mean, it's not the most obscure joke in the world...he probably did just think it up on his own. (Although naming the character Yoshi is awfully strange).

I've been thinking about a big comedy script I'd like to write as my next, um, undertaking, and I've run into the same sort of situation. Without giving away all of the details of the story, let me just say that it involves a character based loosely on Jean-Claude Van Damme. I realized only the other day that an old episode of "The Critic," that Jon Lovitz cartoon, made fun of Jean-Claude Van Damme in a similar way as my script (including giving their character the highly-amusing name Jean-Paul Le Pope).

Is there a chance that a joke or two I write will overlap "The Critic"? Absolutely. This is the sort of thing that used to bother me a lot when writing comedy - the idea that someone would read a joke in my script and relate it to another joke they had seen, and then think of me as some kind of hack who rips off old jokes.

But the more comedies I watch, on TV and in movies, the more I realize all the jokes are old, and it's the context that keeps people laughing.

Example: how many movies and TV shows have borrowed the old "secretly feed someone laxatives and wait for their bowels to clench" joke? I can think of two films off the top of my head - American Pie and Dumb and Dumber - but I'm sure there's 100 more. It's not the set-up that's funny...It's seeing Jeff Daniels running around a house frantically trying to find the bathroom because he has to made #2 urgently.

So I'm glad Yoshi and Larry David have worked everything out. Maybe Larry should consider giving Yoshi a guest spot on the show. He could be hilarious on there, and it's HBO, so he'd be allowed to work blue. I wouldn't suggest he show up on "Two and a Half Men" or anything any time soon, as network TV tends to frown on virulently racist humor, but "Curb" ought to be alright.