RONALD L. SMITH MEME (how long will it take to be stolen and attributed to somebody else?)

MARY PETTY and ALAN DUNN - opposites who were both New Yorker cartoonists

I've been downsizing lately, and that includes giving up a lot of cartoon hardcovers. Oh, I've scanned a few favorites from each book, and I've still kept my Addams and Steig, but Alan Dunn was one that will hopefully amuse somebody else. That is, if there's anybody who still cares about wry New Yorker cartoons back in the days when there was a real cartoon editor and the artists actually knew how to draw.

Dunn's style was rather "atmospheric." Pre-stipple (Drew Friedman) it seemed like everyone in a Dunn cartoon was operating through a haze of dust or air pollution.

As I scanned a few cartoons, and read about him, I was surprised to learn that he was married to Mary Petty. No, I never did acquire one of her anthologies. Her work was, well, flighty and SUNNY. Dunn got nine New Yorker covers, and his wife nearly four times as many. One reason was that Mary's works were so breezy and colorful:

Dunn (1900-1974) who also worked for the "Architectural Record," was the first to find success at The New Yorker, and he encouraged self-taught Mary (1899-1976) to submit her art. She got her first cover in 1927, the second year of The New Yorker's existence. She would offer new cartoons through 1966.

Very few New Yorker cartoonists seemed to be famous to the general public. They didn't kibbitz on Jack Paar's show. They didn't appear in many art galleries (the days of prized "original art" cartoons would only come in this age where everyone worships anything Marvel, and stubbornly refuses to toss their "silver age" and "bronze age" comic books on the grounds that they are all both art and fine literature). They were rarely interviewed in magazines.

Dunn and Petty lived quietly on the Upper East Side, in a three-bedroom apartment that also served as studio space for their art. They had no children, and remained elusive, except for letters. Their papers are housed at Syracuse University, which guarantees that nobody will bother to go through the time and trouble to go up there and access them and try to take some notes on their correspondence with mostly forgotten names such as Peggy Bacon, Isabel Bishop, Warren Chappell and Eric Hodgins. One wonders what either of them wrote to Alan Watts and what he wrote to them.

Dunn and Petty were a bit of an enigma to others at the magazine that gave them so much income. James Thurber was once asked about Mary, and his response was she was "born in a brownstone house on West End Avenue. Her father was a professor. She did not have a particularly happy childhood. That's all, brother." The childless couple seemed to have an uneventful existence until December 1, 1971, when Mary was viciously mugged. The elderly woman apparently did not fully recover physically or mentally. A few years later, Alan Dunn died, and Mary may have already been confined to a nursing home in New Jersey. She died there two years after her husband's passing. They were opposites in cartoon style, but very compatible in real life.

music AND lyrics by JERRY HERMAN

Jerry Herman's died (July 10, 1931 – December 26, 2019). Yes, the day after Christmas IS depressing.

He won several Tony awards for writing the same show over and over.

HELLO DOLLY? Extravagant, obnoxious old bag is the center of attention. The irritating title song actually knocked The Beatles off #1 via the obnoxious cover version by Louis Armstrong. The movie was lame thanks to the miscasting of Baba Streisand who wasn't nearly as old or campy as "Dolly" should've been.

MAME? Same thing: extravagant, obnoxious old bag is the center of attention. Same title song -- everyone saluting the old bag. The Lsnsbury stage production was a hit. The movie turned out to be a disaster thanks to the casting of Lucille Testicle.

LA CAGE AUX FOLLES? HIV positive since 1985, and now uninhibited thanks to gay lib, Herman focused on an extravagant, obnoxious old DRAG QUEEN (played by Georg Hearn) being the center of attention. Once again, the highlight were production numbers showing off costumes. Wisely, he didn't have a title tune referencing the femme's name. The show minced along through various modestly successful revivals, and a well-received film version and yes, an adaptation called "The Birdcage."

When he DIDN'T offer cheesy, costume-heavy musicals about a single flamboyant old bag, Jerry Herman flopped. Or did you catch "Mack and Mabel?" Shows that hinted there MIGHT be a campy old bag on stage didn't do well: "Dear World," "The Grand Tour."

Herman's first success was "Milk and Honey" in 1961 starring Yiddish-vaudeville star Molly Picon along with Mimi Benzell. It was about aging widows looking for hubbies while on a tour of Israel. It received five Tony Award nominations and lost them all. Broadway was morphing away from Jewish stars (such as Zero Mostel in "Fiddler on the Roof") and stories that might attract the Wednesday matinee crowd from Long Island. Gay audiences were beginning to become a force, both in supporting gay authors, gay themes, and campy items like "Hello Dolly" with Carol Channing, which was Jerry's next show, and the hit of the 1964 season.

A total of three hit musicals and a few well-regarded but shorter-lived items isn't too shabby. No, it's chic. Also, Herman was that rarity, often writing both music AND lyrics. Usually Broadway musicals are done by a "team." Jerry didn't offer a new show in the past 30 years, but instead enjoyed his hobby of decorating houses.

These days, fortunately, you rarely hear "Hello Dolly" or "Mame" on the radio. "I am What I am" is a gay anthem standard, and a favorite of drag queens all over the world. No doubt "La Cage" will be revived again and again on Broadway, where "Kinky Boots" and "Tootsie" and other drag shows run almost forever. Perhaps "Hello Dolly" and "Mame" will be revived too -- of course, with the lead played by a guy in drag.

And, like, Lenny Da Vinci, he did "Mona Lisa"

Oh, there was a just another little reminder of how dumbed-down people are, and how they can't communicate properly. Ain't it a shame? It's all, like, sort of sucks, dude.

Lookit who died. It's the woman who DID the theme from "Friends."

No proofreader needed. We all know what up. Know wuttum sayin? We KNOW what she DID. She DID the "Friends" theme.

I'm sure that all the people who actually know what the FUCK the "Friends" theme sounds like, are fine with knowing who DID it. It might only be people who never watched that stupid show and were reading a book instead, who would be objecting.

The woman WROTE the theme for "Friends." Is that sentence too esoteric? WROTE has two extra letters in it, compared to DID. That's a problem?

Who wrote "Sweethearts of 60's TV." I did. But did I "do" the book "Sweethearts of 60's TV?" Yes, your honor, I "did it." But that's a confession. When I worked on the book, I was WRITING it.

It's a small quirk chipping away on the larger crumble of grammar? Well, I guess I'm all into correctness, and I'm not down with or in with any outage in the English language.

PS, when are we all officially sick of shortened nicknames for people (J-LO, Scar-Jo) or couples (Brangelina). But I digress.

The good news is that eventually there won't be an English language. Nobody will be teaching Shakespeare. It'll be rap. And when you make a phone call, "If you want to hear our menu in English" might be the 9th button you press, with #1 being Spanish, #2 being Ebonics, #3 being Chinese....

Somebody be cool with that. Somebody be "dropping" a song that somebody DID, which will 'splain what the deal is. Or maybe what ever people do, or did, will be rapped by the next president, P. Diddy.

Rubbing Off Letters at BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO

Know what was fun?

Going into the DVD rental store, and scraping a letter off the box cover.

Yep, you could rub off a letter and have some fun.

Of course, another type of fun for some: going to the back where the adult material was, and rubbing off.

Meme and Joke Thieves? No $$ For Creativity? Watta Surprise...

"The Atlantic" made it official. If you think you can earn money or gain fame by throwing your jokes on Twitter, or making a meme that goes viral...the answer is NO.

Like most everything else that involves creativity — photography, writing, music, movies — the Internet gobbles everything up, and spits it out for FREE. We're all supposed to keep our day jobs (if we even have them) and DONATE our creativity FREE.

Oh yes, and if anybody DOES have any money, DONATE it to a GOFUNDME campaign because the Internet is now the alternative for the government doing its job (like providing health care). Oh yes, and give PAYPAL donations to bloggers who go around sucking music, apps, comic books, whatever from mysterious torrents and putting them up on their more visible GOOGLE-driven blogs.

About the only surprise in this article (which you can Google for FREE to see the whole thing) is that it isn't just vainglorious weasels stealing memes and jokes to impress their small circle of friends, or to attempt to beef up their Twitter follower list, it's rich business scumbags.

Memes are regularly stolen by MEME websites. In many cases, especially on those "QUOTE" websites, all that changes is the photo in the meme. Like harvesting body parts, weasels monitor the Net and harvest new QUOTE MEMES...and it doesn't matter if George Carlin, Abe Lincoln or Groucho Marx ever said the attributed joke. It's stolen, credited to the wrong person, and a different stolen photo used on the MEME.

An idiot website where cat photos were mated with stupid captions ("I Has Cheezburger!") joined The Great God Google, and Bozo Bezos and Wikipedia and Assange in screaming that NO LAWS should EVER be passed involving copyright on the Internet. "It will RUIN FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!!!!!!!"

Right, it would also mean that websites would actually have to PAY for the photos they use, answer DMCA takedowns quickly, and not laugh all the way to the bank.

If you want the lyrics to almost ANY song, just type the song title and LYRICS, and there you are -- maybe a dozen look-alike lyric-theft websites. Usually all of them have the same mis-heard lyrics, too. They just steal from each other, and since these sites are usually spawned in Croatia or Ukraine or some other armpit country full if jibbering shoulder-shrugging monkeys who can't speak English, it's up to YOU to amend the lyrics you just downloaded.

Joke thievery isn't new, of course. Milton Berle made a joke of being "The Thief of Badgags." He'd even set himself up as the stooge for a punchline. He used this one hundreds of times on variety shows:

MILTON: (after somebody told a joke that got laughs) "I wish I said that."

ZINGER: "You will."

Some comedians, a touchy and sensitive bunch, figured that any bit they originated couldn't possibly be thought up by somebody else, and most certainly, couldn't be adapted or improved on.

Will Jordan was depressed and enraged that Jack Carter copied Will's Ed Sullivan impression. Well, yes, it's unfortunate that when a mimic discovers the "key" to a celebrity's identity, others start imitating the imitation.

Will also insisted that Mel Brooks took his idea of a Hitler musical. And Lenny Bruce took a concept, too. Sadly, it made Jordan leery of creating anything else that could be swiped.

Ironically one of his best bits, which nobody swiped, and which I saw him do live at a "Sons of the Desert" banquet, was a brilliant recreation of "Frankenstein," complete with Dwight Frye mimicry and sound effects.

Don Adams stole some bits from Jackie Mason word for word. Mason didn't go rushing to the newspapers to complain. More recently, in the cases of Robin Williams, Carlos Mencia and Dane Cook, the Internet allowed other comics, and some reviewers, to point out tired gags re-used or lines that were suspiciously re-written. Naming and shaming probably didn't affect the box office for these guys.

One of the few examples of money being made on a joke thievery complaint was when a mediocre nobody filed against Conan O'Brien. The whine was that he recognized some of his Twitter jokes in O'Brien's monologues (yes, Conan actually tells a few jokes besides absorbing applause for five minutes on walking out, and then making faces and doing his "string dance").

O'Brien's very logical defense was that dozens of wits will come up with the same topical joke. Some nights, Leno and Letterman writers would come up with almost identical gags, on the same night, and it was obvious there was no way they could've been swiped. If you check the entries in The New Yorker cartoon caption contests, where readers can have the "fun" of wading through hundreds of submissions to vote on their favorites, you'll find the same punchline repeated again and again.

O'Brien eventually settled the nuisance suit because the lawyer fees were getting ridiculous.

The bottom line? Like cellphone blabberers who can't shut up while in a supermarket, bank or on the street, the rude behavior of plagiarists and Internet thieves is now accepted as a part of life. If you want to amuse your Twitter followers or Facebook friends with a meme or a joke, don't be surprised if it turns up all over the Net with no money or credit. If you create something on YouTube, you'll find some jerks in Croatia somewhere harvesting your work and daring you to spend a half hour filing a DMCA when YouTube refused to monetize you in the first place. If you create a Photoshop gag and put it on your blog, with your name and copyright symbol on the bottom, you will soon discover somebody else Photoshopped your name OFF the picture and posted it so that HE could get nice comments.

Bob Dylan sang (and you can listen to the song free on YouTube), "Dignity is the first to leave." Not far behind, Courtesy, Morality, and all the other niceties of civilization. And no, don't expect the law to help you. In most cases, the Internet makes sure either the victim can't find the abuser, or that too much time and money will be involved in getting a cease and desist. Money? Damages? No no, that's in the past. It was in the past that I successfully got a five figure settlement when somebody plagiarized one of my books, using me and my research as an unwilling and uncredited co-writer.

Today..."heaven knows. Anything goes." (I quote Cole Porter, in what actually is "fair use.")

It's a holiday special...it's a nature special...