Beloved curmudgeon (and voice actor, and radio host, and musician) Tom Scharpling has a new cause to grumble about, and, true to form, he’s going after the biggest dog on the online block: Google. Firing up his undying furnace of grouchy ire, Scharpling has accused The Company That Knows Where You Live of ripping off one of his The Best Show running jokes/songs for its latest Chromebook ad campaign.
Does anyone have a clip of me discussing “Come On Y’All It’s Time To Have Fun”? This kills me. STEAL FROM SOMEONE WHO GETS PAID, YOU RATS
— scharpling (@scharpling) November 19, 2015
The song in question? “Come On Y’All It’s Time To Have Fun,” Scharpling’s dorkily acapella’d ode to mindless party tracks, which the comedian has been joking about turning into a hit single for years. (Islands frontman and Serial composer Nick Thorburn took a pretty solid stab at it on the show not that long ago.) But now, the Scharpling-described “RATS” at Google have deployed their own take on the idea of fun and whether one should have it, attaching the song to a new ad for their Chromebook laptops.
Scharpling—whose previous relationship with the search engine company has mostly been confined to the development of DracSearch, the web site that dares to ask, “What if Google was Dracula?”—is characteristically irate at the similarities between the two songs, lambasting the company on Twitter as “the bad guys” and issuing the following statement to Pitchfork:
When I hear elements of The Best Show in other comedy I’m usually flattered, because there are certainly elements of other comedy and comedians in The Best Show. But this is not a matter of influence or parallel thinking. This is a case of straight up thievery.
Google is a terrible company whose crimes against humanity are legion. And shamelessly ripping off content from a radio show that I have written and performed for free over the last fifteen years is merely their latest shameful act.
I will be pursuing this matter to the fullest extent of the law. Future updates and new episodes of The Best Show will be posted at www.TheBestShow.net.
The good guys will win in the end!