Did SNL swipe tiny hats from Tim and Eric?

An SNL skit about tiny hats from night's show is awfully reminiscent of a much earlier Tim and Eric bit. The war of the petite chapeaus is on.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Anonymous

What about the much earlier skits with Will Ferrell and his tiny cell phone and the later skit with his tiny ring computer that he needs special glasses to see the tiny screen with?
Anonymous

Must I be the first to come to the defense of Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier’s gay caricature movie reviewers from In Living Color? They wore tiny hats FIFTEEN YEARS before Tim and Eric. We have to trace this vast conspiracy back to its source! Or just realize that several comedians independently came to the conclusion that tiny hats are funny.
doplgangr

no, it’s just that tiny hats are all the rage. T&E and SNL stole them from Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/listing/57289201/material-girl-3inch-pink-tiny-top-hat

who stole them from from In Living Color:
http://youtu.be/FK-VVzh4oRQ

there is nothing new under the sun…
- tristis
  
  And In Living Color stole them from the Simpsons, which in turn stole them from an even earlier Twilight Zone episode!
  
  What a sad day when South Park has a more mature and thoughtful take on an issue than Boing Boing.
- Anonymous
  
  … who stole them from Chuck Littlehat. (http://www.unclefloyd.com)
doplgangr

eh, should have put this link for Etsy, so you can get the full range of tiny hats…
http://www.etsy.com/search_results.php?search_query=tiny+top+hat&search_type=handmade
mr.skeleton

Why everybody gotta be hatin’? The idea that little hats are silly isn’t really a pinnacle of comedy innovation. I laughed at both skits!

Does this mean I’m not allowed to wear a little hat without disclaiming that other people have worn little hats before me?
DanC

If the SNL sketch had taken the idea and was funnier, there might be something here. As it is, no harm done.
DanC

Cripes, I can’t get over how unbelievably unfunny that SNL sketch is. I’ve seen funnier skits at summer camps.
Anonymous

I also previously saw the skit with the pubic (yes, pubic) hair club on another skit comedy show. They even had the shower/swimming/wet scene.

I think this episode was a case of lazy writer.
Anonymous

You blew it, SNL!
Anonymous

And Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Good Job is awfully reminiscent of old internet humour (e.g. the G.I. Joe vids, Spongmonkeys, every damn thing), M.I.A, Dan Deacon, The Mighty Boosh, Gayniggers from Outer Space, Napoleon Dynamite, Weird Al, Niel Hamburger (obviously), Crispin Glover, Barnes & Barnes, Conan O’Brien, SNL (yes), Mr. Show, Christopher Guest movies, Pootie Tang, Skittles commercials, Burger King commercials, Starburst commercials, Bobby Conn, Mitchell and Webb, the video for Got Your Money, Tom Green, Beavis and Butthead, Todd Solondz, McSweeneys, Don Hertzfeldt, Strangers with Candy, the T.V. stuff in Robocop, Look Around You, Family Guy, Home Movies, Space Ghost, ATHF, Sealab, everything else that’s ever been on Adult Swim…
Anonymous

Television “meme-ery”?
Anonymous

tiny hats have been funny forever, before anyone reading this was born — SNL did not steal from T&E

http://vimeo.com/11254444
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-am7T7wcQc
Anonymous

To be fair, Tim and Eric have taken inspiration from SNL as well:
(there is ad, clip follows)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSn5QuL6fYU
Micah

Aside from the phrase “tiny hats” and a general lack of LOLPMs, I don’t think these two sketches have hardly anything in common.

Now this is a completely different story.
d913

I saw this on Saturday and immediately thought of the T&E sketch. My girlfriend who reads those trashy magazines at the supermarket checkout line pointed out Ellen DeGeneres wore a tiny hat on the runway at a fashion show recently:

http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2010/09/fug_girls_richie_rich.html

But certainly the tiny hat sight gag has to go way back before T&E or In Living Color?

And how about that microscope?
Anonymous

Here’s proof of NBC stealing jokes from a web video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS54G4L_OwQ

We shouldn’t stand for this.
Anonymous

Chris Morris’ and Charlie Brooker’s Nathan Barley was probably my first exposure to tiny hats.
Anonymous

You mean no one has ever thought of tiny hats as a source of comedy? Except monkeys that play music?
firebus

tim and eric stole it from nathan barley, who probably stole it from aymara women in bolivia. really, tiny hats belong to our global cultural heritage and no one can own them.
Anonymous

The T&E sketch came out three years ago.

Besides, you can only copyright an IDEA, not the EXECUTION. That legal line is in place to protect artists who are doing their job: to push and evolve current trends and ideas in new directions.

Two things are similar:

The use of the phrase “tiny hats” which is funny, but its low hangin fruit. Its not that original, consider the meat grinder of ideas that goes through a typical comedy writer session.

The hat being hidden inside another hat. Also low hanging fruit. Its nearly a “first idea,” an obvious step in thinking from the premise.

Put down your pitchforks. This is nothing special at ALL.
- Pantograph
  
  I think you have that backwards. If ideas were protected by copyright, then the Herbert estate would have won it’s lawsuit against George Lucas for taking ideas from Dune and the writers of Holy Blood Holy Grail would have taken Dan Brown to the cleaners in their suit. Both suits, filed thirty years apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic, failed.
pecoto

Nothing to see here. SNL was sucking at comedy before Tim and Eric even THOUGHT about sucking at comedy.
taar

Rob Corddry’s tiny hat on the Daily Show predates both of these, and it was actually funny:

http://www.videosurf.com/video/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-june-10-2003-hairless-whisper-112819146
rossmcd

I’d strongly agree with the sentiment that there really is no comparison between T&E and SNL. T&E is wayyyy more creative and funny.
jeligula

Probably so. The more important question is whether it should be viewed as plagiarism or homage.
txhoudini

The Tim and Eric sketch is shorter and has more laughs. This just shows everything that is wrong with SNL since about 2000.
Xeni Jardin

T&E has more LOLPM = laughs per minute
- Felton / Moderator
  
  T&E has more LOLPM = laughs per minute
  
  This calls for a Buckyballs/Zen Magnets-style scientific comparison!
agonist

I don’t think it can be called an homage when a very famous, internationally known TV show borrows an idea from an obscure and much funnier one.
Anonymous

This isn’t the first time that I think SNL has swiped from Tim and Eric. Either last season or the year before, Kristen Wiig was in a sketch at the very end of a show that was about selling hot air balloons. Everything about the sketch looked exactly like a Tim and Eric video: the horrible video editing, bad local commercial acting, weird product.
Anonymous

I expected there to be more similarities between the two skits. If you watch them both they’re pretty different… mostly because the T&E sketch is brilliant and the SNL one is… yeah. That being said it needs to be publicized.
Boondocker

Boy, I’d sure hate to know what everyone was talking about. Thank goodness for regional viewing restrictions!
- Jardine
  
  The regional viewing restriction pages are very similar. They both tell me that I won’t be watching unless I fool them into thinking I’m in the US or find another source. I wonder whether Hulu ripped off Comedy Central or the other way around.
mrbarbasol

Of course they stole it.
SNL hasn’t had an original idea since the 80s.
gcason

I remember the old days when SNL was the edgy comedy show that the stodgy shows “borrowed” from.
Anonymous

Come on – consistancy here. The Columbia kid who lifted a bit for his speech got totally ripped into. He was basicly a clueless kid who knew nothing about the intellectual propery norms of stand-up comedy, so I thought it was a little excessive, especially when people started to make inuendos into his academic integrity. To be fair though, EVERYONE hates valedictorians because like corporate executives, lawyers, bankers and politicians – everyone suspects that they are the spawn of basement cat and the root of all evil in the universe. In this case, SNL is an industry insider, they KNOW the norms. They can and should be roasted. Yeah, good artists borrow great artists steal, but when great artists steal, they are great because they innovate and make it their own. They steal to build on and make things better. Did SNL do this? No.

For a study on how IP norms of comedy has actually CHANGED the innovation, the creativity and the presentation of the comedy we see:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1635023

These things matter.
SarahFenix

There’s no way this could be considered Fair Use or an homeage. When it comes to cracking down on stealing copyrighted content, the biggest networks are the biggest hypocrites. I really hope T&E/Cartoon Network(CNN) sues the sh*t out of SNL/NBC(Universal). Let’s get the BB community to join the #tinyhatswar on the Twitter!
wood29

It’s “petits chapeaux”, actually.
superduper

Wait. Seriously? Look, I know everyone has a hardon for T&E and SNL pretty much sucks on an incredible consistent basis but… no. Sorry. One sketch features tiny hats and the other… holy shit, those hats are tiny! Clearly stealing. I even saw a T&E skit about pants the other day and I immediately thought they were stealing from SNL! Is nothing sacred?!

Now if SNL all of a sudden did a sketch about a middle aged guy going around sitting on people and singing a song, I believe that there is a swipe.

I don’t mean to defend SNL, because it is terrible, but I just wish a blog viewed by a bajillion people (actual stats) would take a LITTLE more caution before throwing out accusations about plagiarism, especially in the comedy world. And, yes, it’s still an accusation even if you add a question mark. I tried using that trick in debate class with such retorts as “I have irrefutable proof that you like to eat babies?” and I learned the hard way. The D- way!
delgrego

Neither sketch is similar and neither is funny. Bleh!
Anonymous

Never understood the SNL hate. You write 20 comedy skits in 5 days and perform them live on the 6th day.

Also, I never understood the reverence for older SNL either. I watched ‘em. It wasn’t wall-to-wall laughs back then either. Anything written and performed in a week will be hit or miss. The show has been consistently hit or miss for 3 decades. And this is coming from a big fan.

By the way, neither skit was very funny.

Anon#5: You know they’ve been doing commercial sketches like that since the 70s, right?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  If you can’t keep the meat fresh, close the butcher shop.
  - sbarnes2
    
    Keep your meat ice cold.