When you first start performing stand-up you tend to show the influence of the comics who inspired you. I loved Richard Prior, Robert Klein and George Carlin, so early on my act came off like a Black, Jewish Hippy. The good comics chip away the mannerisms and material of their mentors to get to the funny inside of them. The Generic Jokers, seduced by the easy laugh, continue grabbing bits of whatever they hear other comics score with until the cruise ships finally find a younger hack to comfort the audience with his comedy quilt. When headlining the comedy clubs, I always watched the opening acts for the first few shows of the week, mostly to determine which of my jokes might need to be shelved for the week. It's a terrible feeling to be onstage when one of your best bits fall flat, only compounded by a voice from the stillness of the crowd, "The other guy already did that joke."

It was to be expected that by the end of the week some of the little road mutts might start covering the same areas as your material, or even deliver the material in your cadence. No big deal, because they never really understood why they were saying what they were saying, so the laughs weren't that big. The physical laws of joke osmosis only allow the deficient comedian to take in enough material to achieve an even state with the surrounding material. They can never exceed the original source. At least that's the classic theory attributed to the fifteenth century French physicist and court jester, Mosillius.

At the Atlanta Punchline1988, I sat back stage waiting to the do the Sunday night show, the ninth show of the week. I listened to the middle act do a whole new act, twenty five minutes of my material, a word for word tribute. I was experiencing the practical effect of Mosilius' theory. For while the comedian absorbing the surrounding material can never be as funny as the source of that material (Robbin Williams the exception proving the rule), it is very difficult for the source then to become funnier than the comedian taking the material, even though the audience expects just that – the headliner to exceed the middle. I had to go out and follow myself, forced to top myself, to do better than me.

That realization didn't come to me until minutes later when I was slogging through the muddy water of a sinking stage. The only thing I knew for certain was I must kill the deliriously happy hack bouncing around the green room like a winning prizefighter. I heard the MC begin my intro, so I settled for killing his stage buzz. Once informed that his new act was still part of my current one, old slick slipped on a quick look of remorse and told me, "Oh yeah, that was your material. Sorry, man. I forgot you were here." There was no remorse. I imagined he made a mental note – always check to see if the person he was stealing material from was going onstage next. I spent an hour dancing around the mines that were my jokes and rushed offstage to put a physical print on his lesson. Unfortunately, the varmint had skedaddled for the next henhouse in his two year, three hundred thousand miles old, Honda Civic.

I worked with him about two years later. He looked about twenty years older and his Honda had aged even more, but he was wiser. I wasn't angry with him. It's tough to stay mad at a guy who must live his life scurrying from under one rock to the next. He never did one of my jokes the whole week. Instead he chose to do a thirty-minute, joke for joke tribute to Richard Jeni.

I never said a word to him about his thievery. Instead I engaged him in safe, useless, and harmless small talk - the same sort of fake camaraderie that might be enjoyed by two coal miners who dated the same woman as they descend to their job site. As Nicholson's character said in Easy Rider, "We're all in the same cage here."