James Corden has been struggling to rehabilitate his public image in the wake of claims and rumors that he’s not exactly a gracious guest when dining out at restaurants. And a kerfuffle during his The Late Late Show monologue on Monday, in which he seemingly stole a joke from comedian Ricky Gervais, probably isn’t going to help sway the court of public opinion.
The moment occurred when Corden was discussing Elon Musk’s questionable plans to charge verified Twitter users to keep their blue checkmarks. “I mean, not his worst idea,” the host quipped. “His worst idea would be buying Twitter. That’s his worst idea.”
“Well that’s why I think when you see Elon Musk talk about Twitter he does this thing where he goes ‘Well, it’s the town square’ … well, it isn’t,” Corden continued. “Because if someone puts up a poster in a town square that says ‘guitar lessons available,’ you don’t get people in the town going ‘I don’t want to play the guitar! I want to play the piano, you piece of sh*t!'”
“That sign wasn’t for you, it was for someone else. You don’t have to get mad about all of it!” he added.
Unfortunately, and perhaps unbeknownst to Corden, that was almost a straight ripoff of the Gervais bit, who shared the clip on Twitter.
“The bit about the town square advert for guitar lessons is brilliant,” Gervais wrote in a since-deleted tweet, along with a laugh-cry emoji.
“That’s what the word is like, people take everything personally [and] think everything revolves around them, right? Particularly on Twitter,” Gervais said in his 2018 Netflix comedy special, Humanity. “I’m not tweeting at anyone, I’m just tweeting, OK? I don’t know who’s following me … they can be following without me knowing, choose to read my tweet, then take that personally.”
“That’s like going into a town square, seeing a big notice board, and there’s a notice [for] guitar lessons, and you go ‘but I don’t f*cking want guitar lessons!'” he added.
In any case, Gervais may have deleted his tweet, but his fans quickly pounced on The Late Late Show to troll Corden over the joke.
One fan evoked an old joke from the UK version of The Office, which Gervais co-created with Stephen Merchant.
In all likelihood, however, it was probably not Corden who came up with the joke but a member of his writing team, as Gervais pointed out. “No. I reckon one of the writers ‘came up with it’ for him,” he responded to a fan who asked if Corden asked permission to use the joke. “I doubt he would knowingly just copy such a famous stand up routine word for word like that.”
Be that as it may, but a few weeks ago we would have also doubted that Corden would scream at restaurant servers to get free drinks, so that’s neither here nor there. But seeing that it’s not even a particularly clever joke, hopefully the whole thing will settle down soon.
