Good artists copy and great artists steal; that's the saying. But in comedy, true artists reference. Whether it's Community devoting an episode to Dungeons & Dragons or 30 Rock throwing in a Star Wars sight-gag, the best comedy taps our shared experiences to deliver a joke that we're all in on. Joe Sabia knows this—and he's using it as a call to arms for those of us who make our points using other people's intellectual property.
Sabia, a director and copyright-reform advocate, is the creator behind The Office Time Machine—a massive video-based archive of pop culture references from the show's nine seasons, categorized by year. Type in "1997" and it pulls up a video (above) of all the 1997 references on the show (Michael talking about Good Will Hunting, which came out in '97). All told, Sabia cataloged and supercut around 1,300 references.
"I created this project to advocate for copyright reform and highlight the importance of fair use in protecting creators and their art," Sabia writes. "To prove culture is not only everywhere, but that certain references to films, songs, and works of art are critical for our collective understanding of comedy and to the importance of relating to content."
Sabia's site doesn't offer many other details on what kind of copyright reform he'd like to encourage beyond "let artists bang it out without fear of being sued." But honestly, it doesn't have to. From albums to feature films, all kinds of culture builds on a preexisting text—and this massive collection of clips, which Sabia collected by requesting and ripping Office DVDs from Netflix for a year and a half, proves that. It's not Girl Talk's Night Ripper or Tina Fey turning "Night Moves" into "workin' on my night cheese" on 30 Rock, but the point is the same: All culture is built on a bedrock of what came before it. Trying to keep creators off of it like it's sacred ground only makes things worse—and boring.
Check out Sabia's video for the 1997 Office references above; below, a video of references he's still trying to identify. But watch them both fast—there's always a chance they could get taken down for copyright infringement.
