Monday, January 28, 2008

Joke Sued

Knock, knock. Who's there? Jay Leno's lawyer. Jay Leno's lawyer who? Jay Leno's lawyer's gonna sue your ass.

It's so rare that I have some sort of connection-- tenuous or otherwise-- to a semi-major new story. In this case, my jokes have appeared in some of the books at the heart of the Jay Leno/Judy Brown lawsuit.

Here's a breakdown of how it played out: Jay Leno sued Judy Brown accusing her of using some of his jokes, without his permission, for some of her many books. Jay Leno won.

I actually gave Judy Brown permission to use a few of my jokes for her book, The Funny Pages. I was a tad upset, however, when she used those same jokes for other books without my permission.

I didn't sue.

Here are my jokes that appeared in Judy Brown's 2002 book.

Page 3: The biggest marketing disaster in history was Campbell's Soup for One. They might as well have called it Cream of Loser Soup. "Open can. Add tears."

Page 26: Women breast-feeding in public always defend themselves by saying, "It's a beautiful thing." Yeah, so is sex, but I've never done it in the middle of Denny's. Although that would be a Grand Slam Breakfast.

Page 64: Single women, date a lot of guys before you get married. I had what I called my series of Time/Life Boyfriends. I examined them for fourteen days, kept the ones I wanted, and hung on to the free gifts.

Page 154: The only perfect man is Mr. Ed. He's hung like a horse and he can hold a conversation.

Page 211: Cosmopolitan magazine says that a man reaches his sexual peak at eighteen, but a woman doesn't reach hers until thirty-five. Of course, we're not talking age, we're talking minutes.

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