Wednesday, October 8, 2014

SNL accused of joke theft in Nebraska riverboat sketch

Last Saturday, SNL aired a sketch about a Tina Turner tribute trio performing on a fictitious Nebraska riverboat cruise which, apparently, was remarkably similar to a Groundlings comedy troupe sketch.
     AKSARBENT saw the unusually lame SNL sketch and frankly, if the jokes had been stolen from us, we'd keep quiet about it.
     In any case we saw few, if any, purloined jokes, but SNL sure did rip off the scenario and mise-en-scène.
     From ThinkProgress:
The allegations of theft started when [Groundlings performer Kimberly] Condict responded to the SNL sketch on Facebook. On Sunday afternoon, she posted:
If you liked the sketch SNL did last night about a Tina Turner tribute band musing and singing to "Rollin' on a River," then you'll LOVE this sketch Vanessa Bruiser Ragland and I wrote and performed for six weeks this summer at Groundlings about a Tina Turner tribute band musing and singing to "Rollin' on a River!"
Groundlings teacher Ian Gray followed up shortly after that, accusing SNL of repeated counts of joke theft:
...But, over the years I have seen MANY, MANY sketches flat out stolen from my friends by Saturday Night Live. Nearly verbatim. Word for word... And everyone in our community goes "Oh man. That sucks." and nobody says anything because I guess SNL is still some dream for some people or they don't want to get involved, or a million other reasonable things that stop people from standing up for each other when things are blatantly wrong.

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