What is kleptomania?
Kleptomania is a rare but serious "handsy" disorder where a person - or as she will be referred to in this article henceforth, "the author" or "Tracie" - experiences a strong urge to steal, often for excitement. But there's no thrill in stealing jokes on
the internet, is there? There's glory, I guess, in people thinking you're funnier than
you are. The same way there's a certain "glory" in telling people you were in the towers
on September 11th, or that you graduated at the top of your class in the Navy SEALs. But saying you almost died on 9/11 is probably a pathological-lying thing, and joke thievery seems more akin to lying than kleptomania. Just a sec...
Already there were grumblings earlier in the year about the author "copying" the style of Hyperbole and a Half with the drawings and the
text and the text and the drawings...
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| Hyperbole and a Half |
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| Crack You Whip |
Tracie claims she had never seen Hyperbole and a Half when she created her
character, and one commenter concurred, saying the author has been "doing
this for years, this is just a different blog(!)." Sounds good, but I went
to her old blog to investigate and found that the character you see above didn't make its appearance until
January this year. In all the author's posts last year, the character looked
like this:
It almost seems like the character evolved in an instant to fulfill a New Year's resolution the author made to boost traffic by sparking controversy with a much bigger blog (ahem). Whatever the case, I'm confident no one was calling her drawings Hyperbole rip-offs a month earlier when they looked like that.
HAAH CYW
But you sit still, because it only gets better: Tracie went on to address the accusations in a blog post where she dismissed her
critics as haters and proceeded to defend her work with exactly the same mocking arguments made by the author of Hyperbole and a Half
when she was accused of stealing:
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| CYW |
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| HAAH |
(psst...you forgot 'teeth')
Thank
you. And I know. But that is not what prompted me to speak out today against
Crack You Whip.
This
is. A recent CYW post, titled "Not Your Everyday Kool-Aid
Story," is ironically
the same Kool-Aid story anyone under 25 has heard a dozen times before,
namely, "Not So Kool-Aid," a stand-up bit made famous by universally beloved stand-up comedian Dane Cook. Here are some
snippets of the CYW post and the corresponding excerpts from the Cook routine:
[CYW] I lay in my bed at night, vigilantly watching the walls, waiting for them to fly apart by this devilish red glass pitcher. I knew that he was out there roaming around in the darkness with his glassy exoskeleton waiting to destroy my walls and scream "Oh, Yeahhhh, I got you now!" in my face like a big screaming bowl of punch.*
[Dane Cook] "I’ll tell you what used to actually give me nightmares. Remember those Kool-Aid commercials where that big talking bowl of punch, he would come crashing through your fucking wall in your living room, like, 'OH, YEAH! OH, YEAH!'"
[CYW] I just knew that after breaking through my wall he would try to get me to drink his Kool-Aid. There was no way I was drinking out of him after all of that dust and debris flew into his open head.
[DC] "And the little kids were all excited. 'Yes, yes!' And then they would drink out of him after debris fell in his open dumb head."
[CYW] It bothered me that he didn't understand Casual Property Damage. There was a door, after all. I just wanted Kool-Aid, not to destroy my parent's home.
[DC] "Fuck drinking out of him. If that was me I’d be all, 'No, no, no, you fix that wall before my dad gets home from work. He’s gonna beat me with a belt, he’s not gonna believe a talking bowl of fruit punch came in here, you stupid idiot. Yeah, coming through the wall was real fucking cool. Using the front door is cool!'"
She also included a story about accidentally making Kool-Aid with bleach instead of sugar as a child, which for her sake I hope actually happened so she has a plausible excuse for her crimes when they finally haul her ass in front of a judge.
Serving the defendant:
Dane Cook is the most well-known stand-up comic of the
last ten years by a margin even bigger than this lady's balls. What the hell floats through her head? And how did no one say anything in almost a hundred comments? Maybe they just figured he stole it from someone, so no
foul?
YES
foul! Naughty-naughty, Tracie. Time to get you whip a-crackin'...
