It's THAT joke again....

Micky Flanagan uses gag from plagiarism row

Micky Flanagan has stumbled into a plagiarism row after telling the same gag on Mock The Week that’s already at the centre of a notorious joke-stealing controversy.

On Thursday's show, the London comic told of his frustration at going to a U2 concert and seeing Bono invite his audience to sing along. Flanagan said: ‘Bono keeps on saying “Come on, join in, you know this one”,’ he said. ‘I paid £25 to get in here and you’re getting about quarter of a million quid - you sing it.’

But it is the exact-same idea that caused hopeful Jordan Paris to be vilified after he repeated word-for-word a Lee Mack routine when he appeared on Australia's Got Talent.

The line didn’t go unnoticed when Flanagan told it on BBC Two, with a few viewers also drawing attention to the similarities on Twitter, while on Chortle's forums, a viewer called Paddy said: 'Micky Flanagan is a headline act, so should know better. He deserves to be dragged over the coals'.

The row over Jordan Paris was a major news story Down Under, and covered by Chortle and The Sun in Britain. But Flanagan's agent, Christian Knowles,said his client was not aware of the dispute.

He told Chortle: 'Micky’s not a plagiarist, it’s a gag that he stopped doing about 10 years ago but went back to it because it worked with the topics on that episode of Mock The Week.

'Comedians do independently come up with similar ideas/jokes but because of the coverage regarding the contestant on Australia’s Got Talent it made appear that Micky has nicked the gag, this simply isn’t true.'

Although Mack’s version of the joke has become famous because of Paris’s wholesale theft, the idea has been around for a long time. American comic Steve Harvey said a similar thing about rap artists in the 2000 concert film Kings Of Comedy, and other versions of the line have also been attributed to Sheffield comic Toby Foster and Australia’s Dave Thornton.

Ironically, Flanagan once accused directory inquiry company 118 118 of stealing his routine about going 'out, out' for their advertising campaigns.

Here is Micky Flanagan: