What is the difference between plagiarism and homage?

The other day I stumbled across a video on YouTube (I'll embed it below) that makes the claim that beloved movies Airplane and Naked Gun, as well as the TV series Police Squad stole most of their jokes, primarily from the Mel Brook and Buck Henry 60s TV series Get Smart, but also from the 80s TV series Sledge Hammer! and the many Peter Sellers movies. Rather than making an empty allegation, he provides video proof showing back to back in the video the same joke in one of these sources and in Airplane/Naked Gun/Police Squad. It's pretty damning evidence, honestly.

The idea that Naked Gun (and the other Zucker/Abrahams movies) stole from Get Smart evidently isn't new and was first proposed in the Nov 1993 issue of Spy Magazine (read it here, starting on page 18).

^{Leslie Nielsen using Maxwell Smart's shoephone - From that Spy Magazine story}

So... what does this mean?

We all know that there are a limited number of ideas in the world. Most stories take a collection of old ideas and combine them in new and interesting ways. This is easiest to see in Tarantino movies, but it's everywhere. Star Wars, for example, famously borrows large sections of the plot from the Japanese classic The Hidden Fortress and combines this with Flash Gordon as well as other old sci-fi serials. There was an excellent YouTube series several years ago called Everything is a Remix that details how most ideas are just recycled old ideas.

(Here is Everything is a Remix. It's fairly long, but really good. If you have time, watch it all.)

Jokes especially have long been stolen. In the old days, the same joke would appear everywhere. Charlie Chaplin might do a joke, then later you might see the Marx Brothers do the same joke, or the Three Stooges, Abbot and Costello, and so on. This happens even today. Denis Leary has been accused of stealing most of his material from Bill Hicks, with many people joking that you can tell when Leary stopped stealing material because he stopped being funny. Even beloved comedian Robin Williams was known to steal anything and everything he liked. There was an old joke among comedians that if you were performing and saw Robin Williams in the audience, only use jokes that you didn't mind him stealing.

Is that acceptable? Forget that it's super common. Is it wrong? Is there a difference between stealing a joke here and there and stealing almost every joke in the movie, as The Naked Gun seems to do? Or does the stealing of The Naked Gun fall into the Everything is a Remix category, like Star Wars?

I don't have an answer here. I feel like this is a big grey area. Maybe it's more acceptable when you combine multiple sources into something new (like Star Wars) or when you just take a joke or two but less acceptable when you basically just copy without adding anything new. But again, it's a grey area.

Personally I am disappointed to see that Naked Gun/Airplane/Police Squad stole so much material. At the same time, I don't think that affects how much I enjoy those movies. I certainly don't think any worse of the actors, though I do think worse of the writers (it seems like, from the limited searching I did after watching the video, Jerry Zucker is known to be a bit of an asshole about stealing material and refusing to admitting it).

Incidentally, it seems like the creator of Sledge Hammer!, Alan Spencer, whose show remember was mined for jokes for the first three Naked Gun films, wrote a fourth Naked Gun movie. It was evidently very funny but Jerry Zucker worked to kill the project.

Anyway, watch the video below

Posted using CineTV

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org.