He’s attempting to wipe the slate clean.
YouTube creator Joel Haver, 24, responded to allegations Tuesday that “Saturday Night Live” allegedly stole his animated sketch featuring the Charmin bears that he shared on his channel earlier this summer, reports Entertainment Weekly.
The “SNL” sketch in question features the show’s host, guest Miles Teller, Kenan Thompson, Heidi Gardner, Bowen Yang and Punkie Johnson as the butt-wiping blue Charmin bears. In the sketch, Teller tells his father that he no longer wants to be in the family business and wants to follow his true passion: dance.
Haver called the parallels to his video “pretty alarming” but chalked up any similarities to “wild coincidence.”
“When it comes to these stealing accusations, I always err on the side of coincidence,” Haver said in his response video. “I think parallel thinking does happen more often than not.”
“When it comes to the Charmin bears thing, there’s a lot of coincidences that would have to line up to make it truly a coincidence, but I don’t think it was malicious. It was either a subconscious borrowing from somebody on their writers’ staff who saw my video, or it was a wild coincidence,” continued Haver.
The Post has reached out to both Haver and NBC for comment.
Haver, who has nearly 1 million subscribers on YouTube and whose original video has nearly three times more views than the “SNL” sketch, says he isn’t particularly bothered by the resemblance to his video.
“If I still was a smaller creator, which I was for a long time, I could see it rubbing me the wrong way and me being a little more likely to believe they did steal it,” said Haver.
“I have to recognize I’m in a position to not be bothered by it.”
