G.O.T.H.S. Investigation: Did JD Flynn Steal My Very Good Joke?

And, by extension, does that make him a pedophile?

Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a drama series about the cast and crew of an SNL-type sketch series, was terrible. Episode four offers an example of Sorkin’s typical taking a stupid issue and raising it to global thermonuclear stakes, which could work if he were still making a show about the President of the United States, but doesn’t really land when he’s making a show about sketch writers.

Basically, the plot of the episode goes like this: the writers of Sorkin’s fictional sketch show put together a decently-received bit for the “Weekend Update”-esque segment, only to learn after the fact that they may have unknowingly plagiarized another comedian’s stand-up act. Everyone goes into panic mode as they try to figure out what to do next. Here’s some dialogue that I took from a fan site, and you won’t recognize any of the characters’ names but it doesn’t matter, the important thing is Sorkin’s understanding of “what it means when a writer is accused of stealing a joke” [emphasis mine]:

Jordan: How’d it happen?

Danny: I don’t know, it was material that came from the room.

Jordan: What do you want to do?

Danny: Whatever Matt tells us to do.

Jordan: Well, I want –

Danny: Whatever he tells us to do, Jordan. This is his. Accusing a writer of plagiarism –

Jordan: You just said it wasn’t him. It was the writers –

Danny: Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. Martha?

Martha: You might as well accuse him of being a sex offender.

Does Aaron Sorkin think that a writer plagiarizing a joke is on a par with someone committing a sex crime? Apparently! He thought it enough to write a 60-minute episode where that was the main conflict! Sorkin did this throughout Studio 60, as well as his subsequent series The Newsroom; he took stupid issues affecting shallow people who work in television and treated them with the same gravitas as he did on The West Wing. The formula of taking stupid issues and raising them to global thermonuclear stakes doesn’t just translate anywhere.

Oh hey, speaking of “stupid issue raised to global thermonuclear stakes”, there was a thing at the Academy Awards last night where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, and it was a truly incredible day of posting as everyone had to get their takes and riffs in. Here’s my little joke, tweeted at about 2 in the afternoon Eastern time:

Honestly? I think it’s pretty good. True enough to reflect each publication, heightens well, the First Things reference is a good way to land it. It’s very niche but it resonated with its niche, and I went about my day as a good boy who tries to have fun and not pick fights on the internet. But imagine my surprise when I learned that JD Flynn, noted piece of shit and founder of Substack-for-Catholic-pieces-of-shit The Pillar, crapped this one out at around 10:30pm:

Oh is that right JD? Went with a nice little colon-heavy list of Catholic publications and figured you’d riff on how they’d react to the Will Smith thing? That’s very clever of you. You’re branching out into jokes now?

JD, what right do you think you have to try comedy? I’ll have you know my credentials are impeccable in this space. I have taken and passed eight different courses in improvisational comedy, sketch writing, and comedic storytelling at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles, which existed and was respected for a long time before having their terrible management practices exposed, completely collapsing during the pandemic, shuttering three of their four theaters, and finally getting bought out by a soulless private equity firm, but it was kind of a good theater at the time I was there. I was accepted into UCB’s Improv Advanced Study Program in 2012, after submitting an essay on how much I loved the Comedy Central series The Sarah Silverman Program, bascially making me a tenured professor of comedy. I have a podcast where I had to watch the 2021 streaming-only remake of Home Alone for some fucking reason, basically making me an expert on new media and comedy. This is my turf.

Don’t try to do my thing, JD. I don’t try and do your thing, which, if I remember correctly, is scrambling to rebrand myself and pretending to be a journalist after I realized my employer was just a white nationalist propaganda outlet, which happened three years after everyone else realized that. Do I think you could have come at this joke concept originally, instead of stealing it from a dude you blocked on Twitter months ago? No. I’ve seen your attempts at humor before, including the “famous slaps in church history” post your site shat out today. You’re a joke thief. But does that, using Sorkin logic, also make you a sex offender?

Obviously, the answer is yes. Sorkin logic is perhaps not airtight, but it’s better than the logic you use on your own site to accuse people of being sex offenders, which is of course the focus of The Pillar’s most-read post, the now-infamous piece where you purchased Grindr data and mapped it to people’s houses in order to determine which priests were gay, and then wildly speculate on how gay they were, if their sex was “dangerous”, if the clubs they were going to were gay enough, and how being gay probably meant they were sexually abusing children. You did that with no firsthand, secondhand, or thirdhand accounts of any sexual activity, and you did it by copying and pasting scare stories from email forwards about child abuse that had no relevance to the subjects you were covering. I feel like, using that standard, I can get to do it by pointing out that you stole my joke.

By the way, you continue to do all of this while trying to market yourself as a brave objective journalistic voice in the church. But you’re not that. You’re a hack, you’re hateful, you’re homophobic, you’re continuing to damage the already-terrible Catholic media landscape, and, using the logic of one of the most celebrated television writers of the past three decades, you’re basically a sex criminal. But worse than all of that put together: you’re really not funny at all. Please stop trying to be.