An open letter to Jon Stewart

Does Jon Stewart read Max's World? And if so, is he cherry-picking the best jokes from here to toss into his show? The evidence, it would appear, is overwhelming.

To wit: while interviewing Curb Your Enthusiasm's Jeff Garlin on The Daily Show this evening, Jon made a joke about a what-if Cubs-Red Sox World Series that sounded suspiciously like my blog entry from October 16th, 2003. At first, I laughed it off as the sort of humorous (if obvious) observation anyone would make about the 2003 playoffs. But once the laughter had died down I got curious, and I started digging. What I found was a disturbing pattern of plagiarism and creative bankruptcy that Mr. Stewart has turned into a career. See for yourself:

Jon Stewart is the host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, a spoof of television news shows. Remind anyone of HBO's groundbreaking 80's series Not Necessarily the News?

Jon Stewart had a cameo role as "Enhancement Smoker" in the 1998 stoner comedy "Half Baked", whose story is an obviously uncredited rewrite of "How Green was My Valley".

Jon Stewart was in "Big Daddy", which was a rip-off of "Sophie's Choice".

Jon Stewart's nebbishy, short Jewish intellectual shtick was done to much better effect by, you guessed it, comedian/actor Richard Pryor.

And the list goes on and on. Jon, I'm not asking you to repudiate your entire career. Who can forget your work on MTV's "You Wrote It, You Watch It", or your star turn as a man with a bad haircut in "Death to Smoochy"? I only ask for the credit due to me as an artist. And for a small fee I'll even keep quiet about "Playing by Heart". You know what I mean.

Of links purloined and piracies thwarted

I'm adding a link to my brother's online diary entitled "Hours of Fun & Challenge". He goes to San Diego State, which I'm told is beautiful when it's not engulfed in flames. Adam is what's known as a "red-shirt" freshman there, which I assume has something to do with Star Trek ensigns. He is pretty expendable, from a strictly tactical standpoint.

Of late, I've been on something of an odyssey trying to nab a copy of Sorenson Squeeze. It's a video compression tool that shrinks great big video files like my Kill Bill movie down to itty-bitty cute wittle file-lets. Unfortunately, the full version runs a nice $450 (Cheap!) and I constantly find myself missing Benjamins that a hard-working American artist such as myself surely deserves. And so I chose the path less travelled: the outlaw trail.

My first foray was onto the messageboards. I was kindly directed (and by "kindly" I mean I was told "Learn to use Google, you dumbest of fucks.") to any number of warez sites. For those of you not "hip" to my "internet" "scene", a warez site is a download website that strives to ensure that multimedia-authoring software developers, the folks at Rockstar Games, internet pornographers and the filmmakers who brought you "Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag" never make a goddamn cent again. Which, in the latter case at least, isn't such a bad idea. But as anyone who's been to extralegal sites before can attest, what I got for my troubles was several useless keygens and an open invitation to a virus party on my hard drive.

So I turned to slightly less illegal venues, namely my uncle and his vast collection of legally purchased multimedia software. Turned out he had a copy and everything! He burned it onto CD and sent it directly to my home! When I saw that package in my mailbox, you'd have thought Christmas had come twice. Then I slap that thing in my Sony and was hit with the awful surprise. As it turns out, my uncle owns something called an Apple Macintosh, which I imagine he picked up in his Edsel on his way to a drive-in movie theater.

So I'm back to square one and considering getting a PayPal account. I can't imagine anyone would donate money, but their reassuring embedded icon reminds me that nothing in life is free, except wisdom. And pop-up ads. And viruses.