An "Original" Work

Throughout this unit I found myself thinking, as I watched David Letterman’s interview with Tina Fey, about how the female presence in comedy has changed drastically over the years and continues to grow stronger as time goes on. True, it will never be perfect, but perfection is overrated.

It’s refreshing, though, to see the openness and truth shared by a female comic and the encouragement that they offer to do your thing and don’t care if others like it. In fact, some think that humor has the ability to reveal even the mental capacity of the audience, as one can often tell how smart people are by what they laugh at. And as a female comedian, you can’t be that kid standing at the top of the water slide, overthinking it. You just have to go down the chute.

When a person enters the world of comedy they are agreeing to take risks but the key is to say yes and figure it out afterwards. This especially applies to female comics as they experience a lot of resistance, often lead by the patriarchal forces within the world of comedy, but the important thing is to remember that bitches get stuff done. After all, confidence is 10% hard work and 90% delusion.

*This has been my take on an original plagiarism incorporating quotes by Tina Fey (in bold), into the text itself. I found Harris’s final chapter particularly interesting and intriguing with regard to plagiarism and the remixing of media as other forms of writing and this is my attempt at doing something similar to what Lethem did. Like most writers, I'm quite uncomfortable with the idea of plagiarizing anything, it actually kind of freaks me out, so this sort of gave me a free pass to do something I won't be able to do again in this way. 

I found it fascinating, however, to consider the different ways in which we use sources and how, even when citing our sources or completely interpreting and changing what we've read into our own thing, we are still taking part in a sort of plagiarism. In the end, I agree with Harris when he explains how writing, "involves an unexpected use of already existing materials" (Harris 126). After all, what is the final result of a text if not but a build up of life experiences, reading other works and applying them to our own ideas?