You should never rip off one of Jay Leno's jokes – mainly because it's bound to be so unfunny that you'll lose your job, be dumped by your girlfriend and end up dying alone on the streets.

But also there's a chance that Jay Leno will sue you and win. And that's what's just happened. Jay Leno has just won a lawsuit against Judy Brown, who published compendiums containing jokes stolen from his routines.

And as a result Judy Brown will have to publish something less funny instead, like… nope, there isn't any less funny than one of Jay Leno's jokes. 

This writers' strike has been tough on a lot of people, but none have suffered quite as much as Jay Leno. For the strike means that Jay Leno has to host his big-rated nightly hour-long talkshow completely unscripted. And if anything that even so much as looks like a scripted moment occurs, Jay Leno gets called a bastard by the entire WGA.

Worse still, movie stars don't want to cross the picket lines to appear on Jay Leno's show, so he's been reduced to interviewing people like Jimmy Kimmel – which is basically the equivalent of shouting questions into an empty, vaguely ape-shaped, well.

But things aren't completely bleak for Jay Leno because he's just managed to sue the ass off a woman who stole some of his jokes for compendiums she put together. Reuters reports:

The publishers of such compendiums as "Jokes to Go," "Comedy Thesaurus" and "The Funny Pages" vowed to immediately stop printing and distributing the books in a settlement with Leno and fellow comedians who sued author Judy Brown. "In my books, I have published jokes of Jay Leno and the other comedians in this lawsuit without their permission," Brown said in a statement. "I sincerely apologize for doing so. I greatly admire the creativity, wit and energy of stand-up comedians, and I recognize that comedy is as much an art form as other types of creative expression."

Ethically it's a tricky one. On the one hand Judy Brown obviously put Jay Leno's jokes in her books because she's such a big fan of his, and it looks a little unfair when a multimillionaire TV star sues his fans.

But on the other hand, Judy Brown is a Jay Leno fan, so she's probably mad as a biscuit and deserves to be shut away in a lightless box for the rest of her life.

See? We told you it was a tricky one. 

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Jay Leno gets last laugh on joke books - Reuters