James Corden Reacts After Being Accused Of Stealing A Ricky Gervais Joke Nearly Word For Word

James Corden just can’t catch a break. Weeks after a restaurant owner called him out for being a complete douchebag, Corden is now facing heat from a different direction.

The 44-year-old host of The Late Late Show was talking to his sidekick during the show on Monday night when he started talking about Twitter and Elon Musk.

When you see Elon Musk talk about Twitter, he does this thing where he goes, ‘It’s the town square,’ But it isn’t, because if someone puts up a poster in a town square that says, ‘guitar lessons available,’ you don’t get people in the town going, ‘I don’t wanna play the guitar!’ But that sign wasn’t for you, it was for somebody else—you don’t have to get mad about all of it.

The joke was not set up well and seemed kinda forced into the conversation, which makes sense when you consider it wasn’t an original joke.

In fact, it was copied nearly word for word from Ricky Gervais.

Plagiarism? I don’t know what people are talking about, these two jokes by @JKCorden and @rickygervais are barely similar pic.twitter.com/9kYOHiOiLj

— Paul Anthony (@PaulFI9) November 1, 2022

…yikes, right? That feels pretty blatant. He even used “guitar lessons” as an example. It’s almost as if he was wanting to get caught.

Ricky first responded to the madness by cheekily tweeting, “The bit about the town square advert for guitar lessons is brilliant.”

But then had a change of heart when he thought about it and determined it was probably one of Corden’s writers who fed him the joke, which is probably true. Those late night shows have a team of writers.

That makes you wonder though, was someone on his team trying to make him look like a fool? Or did they really just completely forget they heard that joke before? Somehow convinced themselves they made it up in the shower one morning? I don’t know. If I were Corden, I’d be launching an investigation because that sh*t is embarrassing.

For what it’s worth, he did tweet out this response on Tuesday, November 1.

Inadvertently told a brilliant Ricky Gervais joke on the show last night, obviously not knowing it came from him. It’s brilliant, because it’s a Ricky Gervais joke. You can watch all Ricky’s excellent specials on Netflix.