A tale of theft, feminism, and (my) pettiness

Okay, ladies and Nick: I have a story to share with you all. It’s about gender and comedy, even. I told it to my friend Hannah last night via Messenger and she was a great audience (as always). But more than that, she encouraged me to write this...

So thanks to Hannah for the nudging! (Go back when you are done and look at this image again. It's even funnier when you have the whole story in mind.)

Anyway, for years now, even before we had a pandemic (remember that?), I always joked (but was mostly serious) that I have zero skills that will make me useful when “shit goes down.” I always joke that if the apocalypse hits, I am out once the wifi goes down for good. So, when all of [gestures broadly] this started, I was like, “What the heck can I do to help?” (Besides donating money and being lucky enough to be able to do so and keeping my butt at home…) “What I have got to contribute?”

Jokes. I’ve got jokes. Sometimes. And cultural recommendations. This is a story about a joke. A stolen joke. [Cue Law & Order music…]

It started on Sunday morning. I was feeding my feline crew their daily can of wet food and chuckled at the label and took a picture of the can. “There’s a joke here,” I said to myself and/or quite possibly out loud to the cats. (I can’t even blame quarantine for that. I’ve been talking to myself and these cats for years…) Then, for like an hour while I was on my morning walk, I workshopped the joke in my head. I am not kidding. It is ridiculous, but I really do think and think and rewrite emails, social media posts, and…just about everything? And a joke? You gotta get that stuff right. It’s like…one shot, you know? Here’s what I came up with:

I think this is a good joke. It’s short and silly and dumb. It’s timely but not too depressing. It might seem self-deprecating, but it isn’t. I discarded earlier “drafts” about it being my nickname, messed around with wording, etc. I posted it and it made me laugh and did the same for other people. Mission accomplished.

That night, right before I shut out the light, I checked Facebook and saw this, a post by a guy I went to grad school with. Please not that in his original version, the “Courtesy of Heidi Hanrahan” wasn’t there. It was just my picture with his lesser joke. 

Anyway, it made me so mad. As I texted Hannah, “That’s my finger! That’s the can I fed my babies from!” She is hilarious and indulges me, so here was her response.

Let me make another important point. This guy does stand-up and improv. He’s pretty darn funny. But here he is, making a joke about things being “stolen” and he stole my joke. Let’s be clear—he had to actively work to exclude my trace from the picture: he downloaded my image, saved it to his phone or whatever, and uploaded it again to make his own (lesser) joke. He didn’t just hit “share.”

“Just go to sleep,” I told myself. “It’s no big deal.” But the obsessive part of me (which is, let’s just say, an extra chunky part of me) was like, “NO! He should know better. He’s a professional comic." Comics get furious about this stuff. Rightfully so. And he’s a freakin’ English PhD. We get furious about this, too. 

"You have to say something," that obsessive voice told me. "For feminism. And for your seminar students.”

I kid you not: I did it for feminism and for you all. As you can see, I called him out on it—gently—within 20 minutes.

To his credit, he added an attribution (but still not my original better) joke. He made up some excuse about how “it didn't give you credit when [he] shared it.”

But I confronted him, he made it (sort of) right, and the universe didn’t end when a woman called a man out on his trash behavior. So basically, this is me, right?