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James Corden apologized to Ricky Gervais after using one of his jokes.
The 44-year-old TV host came under fire earlier this year for copying a joke – virtually word for word – that Gervais used in his 2018 stand-up show Humanity, but Corden subsequently contacted the comedian to offer an apology.
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Asked if Corden contacted him about the joke, Gervais replied: “He did. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it’.
“I said, ‘If your writers were in the back of the room when I was warming up and you got it out there before I did it on Netflix…’ but whatever you think of James Corden, there is no way he knowingly ripped off my joke and thought he’d get away with it.”
Gervais, 61, previously highlighted the similarities between his Twitter-themed joke and the one that Corden told during a monologue on The Late Late Show.
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Gervais subsequently deleted a tweet that drew attention to the joke, but he doesn’t have any regrets about how he approached the situation.
“I thought it was funny. I thought it was absurd that it was such an obvious rip-off,” the stand-up star told the ‘Headliners’ podcast.
“But again I don’t know how he got to it because the writer must have walked him through and said, ‘Do this and do that’. Or he saw it five years ago and completely forgot about it and thought he’d made it up. That can happen as well.
“There are some plagiarists but a lot of it is genuinely accidental. So that is clearly my routine but I don’t think he came up with it at all. I think a writer pitched that to him and didn’t tell him it was mine, or the writer forgot.”