People have been stealing jokes for as long as people have been telling jokes. Like almost everything else that society has deemed unsavory, joke thievery only became more widespread with the advent of the Internet. A comic doesn't just have to worry about other comics stealing his jokes now, but also an endless stream of bloggers and Twitter and YouTube users who, even after amassing a sizable following, operate in relative obscurity, delighting their thousands of fans who have no idea the things they're laughing at were written by other people.

Luckily, the other side effect of having an Internet box in every home is that getting away with shit like that forever is next to impossible, as these five joke-stealing creeps eventually learned.

These are the five most brazen joke thieves in social media history.