A week or so ago, Gilbert Arenas posted an observation about shark attacks on his blog. The crux of the post was that there are no such things as shark attacks because they all happen in the water, which is the shark’s domain. Initially, everyone remarked about how it was kind of an old premise that he was trying to pass off as a new observation. Turns out, it’s worse than that. Arenas was finally forced to admit that he stole the joke from comedian Ian Edwards. Arenas is a smart guy, so I was expecting a candid, honest mea culpa. Instead, here’s what Agent Zero had to say.

Listen, nobody even heard of Ian Edwards before me. He’s no Chris Rock. I helped him become famous. Now everybody is going to YouTube and looking him up.

The joke was worth about $7 when I heard it, now that I’ve used it’s probably worth a little bit more. I’ll sell it back to him for $7.78. Seventy-eight cents, Ian, you can put that in a royalties check made out to me.

Puffy and Ashanti made careers out of stealing other people’s beats. This is America, the land of the reused.

If you think about it, nothing is original. Every joke has been retold at some point. What I did was recycle a new joke instead of waiting for it to get old. It was too funny not to. I mean, at least I picked a good joke, right? It’s not like it was some lame, “Yo momma” joke.

It’s one thing to steal someone else’s joke. (And that’s what you did, Gilbert. You stole it.) It’s an entirely different level of assholery to then defend said thievery with this lame explanation.

Here’s Ian Edwards performing that very bit on Conan.