If you’re not already viewing The Show, a daily video podcast (no, I will not call it a “Vodcast”, you heathen) by Ze Frank, what the hell is wrong with you?
This past week, Ze covered the flap around the reclusive Russian mathematician who turned down the prestigious Fields medal for his proof of the Poincare Conjecture, which I am not at all adept at explaining. It involves the impossibility of turning a toroid (donut-shaped thing) into a spheroid (ball-shaped thing).
Ze “proved” the conjecture by taking a donut and squishing it into a ball. The next evening, Stephen Colbert, covering the same topic, did the exact same thing. Ze’s viewers were outraged that Colbert would steal this joke without any attribution. I began to wonder with the rest of them whether Colbert’s writers weren’t secret Ze fans.
That evening, I tried to explain the situation to my wife, who is not a particularly strong fan of either Ze or Colbert. I opened with a description of what the Poincare Conjecture is and, before I even got to Ze’s demonstration, the first thing our of her mouth was, “Can’t you just squish a donut into a ball?”
My wife is a wise, intelligent and oft-funny, though not always intentionally, woman. But the fact that she came up with this without having seen nor heard about either Ze or Colbert’s demonstrations makes me believe that there’s no real impropriety happening here. I’m sure if I had heard about the conjecture without seeing the demonstration, I may have thought the same thing. It’s not too uncommon an idea.
This is not proof that Colbert’s team did not steal it (there are a handful of other similarities between some Ze and Colbert productions) but it does lend credence to the argument that it’s just a case of great minds thinking alike.
Why do people assume Colbert has even HEARD of Ze Frank’s THE SHOW? I’ve never heard of it, and I consider myself pretty web-hip.
Plus, it wasn’t a very clever joke. In fact, it was sort of obvious. When two comedians come up with the same joke, don’t assume it’s plagiarism — assume it’s merely a joke that anyone could have thought up without too much effort.
(who the hell is Ze Frank?)
You’ve been tricked. Your wife pre-caches the conversations you are going to have with her, based the knowledge she has of your character.
Most likely she read boingboing without your knowledge, and wow’ed you a few hours later.
She probably does this with a lot of things. I pre-cache conversations I think I might have with friends before I go out. Then I wait until someone stumbles upon the topic and I wow them with the information I have on the subject.
You’ve been pre-cached.
Wh… what? How DARE you impugn the character of so perfect a woman! (she may be reading this…)
I shall go home tonight and confront her immediately to determine the truth about this nefarious affair. If she does, as you imply, indeed “precache” our conversations, she is in for quite a spanking for her insolence.
If, instead, she is as pure of thought and heart as I have always given her due credit… then she is in for quite a spanking as her reward.
TMI? You be the judge.
Who the hell is Ze Frank? He came here as a geeky German immigrant with a bowl cut and a fondness for waterfowl who grew up to currently produce one of the funniest three-minute daily online videos (except weekends) in existence.
You have a point - web geeks blogger types live in a bubble where they just assume everyone has heard of Zafir the Goat Licker and his hilarious podcast when Zafir gets, maybe, 1000 listeners a day.
Having said that, the crews at The Daily Show and the Colbert Report seem to be pretty well jacked in to the online pop culture, and Ze has been mentioned in various online venues - often multiple times - including Boing Boing and Wired. If you want to keep your “finger on the pulse” of Internet culture, those two sites had better be in your RSS feed.
So it’s not at all unlikely that someone at Colbert has seen Ze’s show or that they’ve even seen that particular episode. The topics covered and the intrinsic humor are similar on both shows, so it makes sense to research how other folks do it. In that same vein, though, it also makes sense that, occasionally, they’ll each hit too close to the same mark, and I think that’s what happened here.
I mean, my lovely wife, who may have or have not precached our conversation (ooo… darn you Charles for casting doubt into my marriage! I shall mention you by name in the divorce proceedings!) does not share this type of humor - she only know about political and scientific topics when I bring them up and, even then, tunes me out 90% of the time - and the donut to ball transition was her first thought. So I agree - lame joke, nothing especially unique, no proof of impropriety. They should, however, consider joining forces. I think a Ze Frank - Stephen Colbert/Jon Stewart collaboration would be most hi-larious.
But I’m easily amused.