Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. But in an open letter shared with Variety — by turns defiant, droll and erudite — O’Brien said that he and his accuser had agreed to “resolve our dispute amicably,” aborting a trial that was set to begin May 28 in San Diego.
“I decided to forgo a potentially farcical and expensive jury trial in federal court over five jokes that don’t even make sense anymore,” O’Brien wrote. “Four years and countless legal bills have been plenty.”
It began in July 2015, when writer Robert Alex Kaseberg sued O’Brien; his production company; TBS, which broadcasts O’Brien’s show, “Conan”; Time Warner (now WarnerMedia); and members of O’Brien’s creative team for infringing on Kaseberg’s copyrights by lifting jokes that he posted on his blog and Twitter account.
A judge ruled that three of the jokes could reasonably have been plagiarized by O’Brien or one of his writers — the first of multiple judgments that brought the case ever closer to trial.
In one instance, Kaseberg wrote on Twitter on June 9, 2015: “Three towns, two in Texas, one in Tennessee, have streets named after Bruce Jenner, and now they have to consider changing them to Caitlyn. And one will have to change from a Cul-De-Sac to a Cul-De-Sackless.”
That night on “Conan,” O’Brien delivered a similar joke in his monologue: “Some cities that have streets named after Bruce Jenner are trying to change the streets' names to Caitlyn Jenner. If you live on Bruce Jenner cul-de-sac it will now be cul-de-no-sack.”
Joke theft has long been considered a mortal sin in comedy, and allegations of plagiarism have done lasting damage to once ubiquitous comics, like Dane Cook and Carlos Mencia, who found themselves shunned by their peers as a result.
But knotty philosophical questions — about the likelihood of two people having the same thought at once, or when a mere observation becomes an original creative expression — have largely kept infringement cases out of court.
Fans of O’Brien rallied to his defense after the lawsuit, arguing that “parallel thinking” in comedy is commonplace and that there are only so many ways to tweak a day’s news events. In the letter posted by Variety, O’Brien made the same argument.
“The fact of the matter is that with over 321 million monthly users on Twitter, and seemingly 60 percent of them budding comedy writers, the creation of the same jokes based on the day’s news is reaching staggering numbers,” he wrote.
Representatives for Kaseberg and O’Brien could not be reached for comment.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.