The Universality of Ideas

I remember reading in Tom's Raindance book about filmmaking about the concept of the universality of ideas.

Basically if Hollywood produce a conspiracy thriller that bears a more than passing resemblance to your conspiracy thriller, the chances are you haven’t been ripped off – someone’s just had the same idea as you and beaten you to the punch.

Forget about it, junk your idea, move on. If you can’t come up with more than one concept you’re not really a writer are you?

It’s not an issue I've ever though about that much until I noticed that Sandy Nelson and Raymond Mearns had posted this great sketch on You Tube.



As some 'pish readers may know, we also have a sketch where ginger bottles are used as currency. I’ll post it tonight so you can compare the two (Oops. No I won't. Haven't captured it from my camera yet. Will do eventually.)

So, as you see, the universality of ideas comes into play.

Personally I think Raymond and Sandy’s sketch gets to the joke far quicker than ours and is a snappier effort in general.

We’ll probably drop ours after our upcoming performances and to be honest I’m just glad it wasn’t a sketch we really liked this happened with.

Just shows you though – comedy is as much to do with communicating a shared notion of something as it is with originality and I guess the danger of partial duplication of ideas already explored by others is inherent.

Another instance of this kind of thing in comedy is Rob Newman's character Ray from the days of The Mary Whitehouse Experience. Remember Ray, the guy cursed with the sarcastic sounding voice?

Funny stuff, and I'm sure Newman had never even seen the Kids In The Hall sketch recorded a couple of years before that used the exact same idea. In many ways, its fun as an audience just to see what talented people will do with virtually the same concept. Look at The Aristocrats. So it's maybe not such a big deal after all.

And by the way big T, I’ll give you back that book, honest. It’s only been what? 5 years?