Fat Jew Responds to Plagiarism Controversy, Says He Will "Never Again" Post Something Without Attribution
Referring to himself as "sort of a Renaissance man of pop culture," the Fat Jew finally responds to the comedy scene's general disgust for his work.
Unless you're the sort of person who doesn't give a single fuck who the Fat Jew is or what he does (highly commendable approach to existence), then you've likely been unwittingly swept up in the continued debate of appropriate attribution in the increasingly post-internet industry surrounding all facets of art. A debate much bigger than Fat Jew or similar online voices, the contentious argument reached another fever pitch recently with the announcement that Fat Jew, a.k.a. Josh Ostrovsky, had signed with Creative Artists Agency, one of the largest agencies in Hollywood.
Though never a favored presence by most comedians in the industry, the debate surrounding his seemingly nonchalant attitude toward joke and meme theft crashed into the mainstream conversation while warranting passionate rebuttals of his entire career like the one below:
Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswalt, Doug Stanhope, and many others quickly joined the comedian-led outcry. In typical Fat Jew fashion (i.e. sarcasm, perhaps ill-placed, on full blast), the self-described "performance artist" and "idiot" finally responded to the backlash in a new interview with Vulture. Surprisingly, the Fat Jew has interns (that's plural) who help him run his Instagram through a curation process he describes as so:
As for the repeatedly misattributed or creditless images that have frequented that highly profitable Instagram account, the Fat Jew is now planing to retroactively add the correct attribution while entirely altering his team (that's interns, plural) approach to meme curation:
Elsewhere, the Fat Jew discusses how many years he's spent bathing in either pasta or guacamole and his background as a writer. Some of his claims as to his position in the importance of this authorship debate echo the initial sentiments of Shia LaBeouf in the wake of his own plagiarism scandal. Though LaBeouf ultimately abandoned the near-nihilism idea of "authorship is dead" for something a bit more hopeful, the Fat Jew seems to simply be in favor of whatever saves his career in the quickest and least painful way possible.
Regardless, the debate is real and shall certainly continue.
