James Corden has responded after he was accused of ripping off a Ricky Gervais joke almost word-for-word on The Late Late Show the other night. Here’s the joke spliced with the original Ricky version in case you didn’t see it:
Plagiarism? I don’t know what people are talking about, these two jokes by @JKCorden and @rickygervais are barely similar pic.twitter.com/9kYOHiOiLj
— Paul Anthony (@PaulFI9) November 1, 2022
And Corden’s response after being dragged all over Twitter for it:
Well I guess James Corden not knowing where comedy comes from does make sense. It’s his writers who really should have known better. Although it does seem unlikely that they thought they could get away with stealing a famous Ricky Gervais joke in the first place. Were they intentionally trying to throw James Corden under the bus? Or did they think that the Late Late Show’s American audience (millions of them) wouldn’t have seen Ricky Gervais’s Netflix specials? I mean it’s not like he’s some small up and comer – it’s possible one writer (or maybe the whole group) were trying to f-ck James Corden over.
Anyway, Ricky feels so bad for Corden that he ended up deleting his original Tweet making fun of him for stealing his joke…
Can only imagine the scolding the writing staff got over this. Although maybe James will be trying to play it cool given what happened last time he gave someone a scolding. They banned him from a restaurant, so maybe they can ban him from TV too? Wishful thinking.
