Time beats noise.
Lately, I've been1 frequently experiencing the effects of zeitgeist. Literally, it means "the spirit of the age", and is used to describe the cultural and cultural climate of a particular time or era. Often, two people coming up with a similar or same idea at once despite having never met or spoken can be attributed to the zeitgeist - the idea being shared through collective consciousness.
I recently found out that a joke Tim Poultney and I(well, mostly him but I helped) made in a Pizza Express several months ago had been written(far better) by the webcomic "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal" several years ago. Neither of us had seen the comic in question, and it's quite an easy joke to arrive at - so we attributed it to the zeitgeist, and rightly so.
Yesterday I was shocked, however, to find that another joke I often make has also been done before. Jack and I often talk about how to approach women, and during one session where our talk turned to ridiculous chat up lines I came up with "Hi, quick question - I'm thinking of getting a tattoo. Should I get one of my face on my face or my arm on my arm?". This tickled me so much that I started slipping the line "a tattoo of my face on my face" in other jokes I made, sometimes adding the idea of scaling the image to freak people out.
Yesterday I was listening to an episode of The 99p Challenge, a radio comedy that last aired 3 years ago, and that I started listening to recently thanks to the Intertubes. During one round where contestants were asked what their favourite "waste of time" was, Simon Pegg replied "I like to tattoo an image of my face onto my face."2
I promptly fell off my unicycle.
A Google search reveals no less than 6 distinct examples of people using the exact same joke. I'm a little annoyed, because it's a joke I love using very much. At the same time, I can see now thta it's clearly a very obvious joke(perhaps why no-one else ever laughed...) and there was some odd reason why I couldn't see this before.
I can't remember where I read/heard it, but I recall the advice that "A comedian doesn't make the first joke that comes to mind." It's something I try hard to work on - not making the obvious jokes(which is why I'm dissapointed with Captain Deluge's super-power).
So, with that bombshell, I now publicly announce the changing of my joke, which shall now go "I'm getting a tattoo of my arse... on my bottom."3
1 - At this point in writing, I sneezed with my mouth open and no small amount of snot flew across the room, and I had to get up to clean it.↑
2 - Click here for a clip of this entire(very funny) round.↑
3 - Not really. I'm just retiring the joke all together.↑