Every Time North Korea Fires A Missile, Someone Steals This Joke On Twitter

Maybe the idea of North Korea possessing a functional ICBM capable of delivering a nuclear payload has elicited some nervous laughter from you. Perhaps you let out a chuckle of despair when Trump tweeted about the missile test and you realized you're way less thrilled at the idea of him pressing the button first. You almost certainly didn't, and will never ever laugh at a joke as cornball as this:

Headline humor — a routine so fail-proof that the wealthy car collector and "comedian" Jay Leno enshrined it as the only recurring gag people will remember from his tenure on the "Tonight Show." It's sub-dad joke level comedy and it's absurdly easy to steal, which is what Twitter users have been doing for a while now. See, that juxtaposition of a Serena Williams headline (which has since been edited) and a North Korea missile threat is from over a year ago.

Just a few months ago, almost a year to the day after the headline goof first surfaced, CNN's own Nathan McDermott stole the joke for some easy faves and retweets (and his boss Andrew Kaczynski called him out on it):

Prior to McDermott's tweet North Korea hadn't fired any missiles in over a week — but his untimely plagiarism doesn't hold a candle to the egregious thieving that happened within the first day of the joke's existence. Here's who got the most mileage out of it on the morning after North Korea's March 21st missile launch in 2016:

They stole it from this user:

That user probably stole it from Reddit, where it was posted a few hours earlier on the 21st:

Or perhaps it was lifted on Twitter off of this guy, who came across the coincidence a few hours later than u/just_commenting, took a different screenshot and politely tagged CNN and Serena Williams in his tweet. For his trouble, he only got one fav and one retweet:

You can't blame anyone for seeing the joke a year later and thinking it's fresh — after all, North Korean missiles are in the news and within the last few months two different publications used the phrase "Serena Williams Fires Back" in headlines concerning two separate feuds the tennis star was pulled into.

As for the thieving? No matter who got there first a year ago, hopefully we can all agree on two things. First, stealing jokes in any setting is bad. Two, if you're gonna steal a joke on Twitter, at least make it a good one.

Please, for all that is good and funny: don't tweet about Serena Williams firing back at North Korea. It's rising to the top of Reddit again. My TweetDeck search for "serena williams" is overflowing with people stealing it.

Just stop.