Comic ability, some people are born with it, some people develop it through years of study, hard work and failure, and some steal jokes from real comedians and post them on Instagram as their own.
The Fat Jew (or Josh Ostrovsky to throw out his guv’mint) chose the latter and now the proverbial house of cards have come home to roost.
For those who are not familiar with The Fat Jew’s antics, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) announced this week that he was added to their roster, news that sent a shockwave through the comedy community as he is well-known for reposting comics’ jokes as his own even going so far as to crop out watermarks. This is a comedy cardinal sin (think Barry Bonds plus Spy/Deflategate plus FIFA, times a million) and The Fat Jew found out what hundreds of conservative politicians already knew, never piss off a comic.
Within hours of CAA’s release twitter was alight with everyone from amateur open-micers to a-list headliners taking a shot at The Fat Jew ranging from Patton Oswalt’s aggregator puns to Paul Sheer’s lamentation that his material had not been pilfered (search @FATJEW for hours of entertainment, for the first-time featuring original thoughts) and posts on Facebook urged readers to spread the word.
Yesterday, it was revealed Comedy Central dropped his pilot script (although they have now claimed the project never progressed past the script and was canned long ago) and companies have already ended sponsorships. It seems it will only be a matter of time before CAA ends their relationship with the Fat Thief but this is only a small part of a much, much bigger problem.
As social media becomes more and more prevalent in our lives, so too does misinformation, plagiarism and even outright slander. In a world fueled by 6 second Vines and one-liner memes it has become all too easy to mindlessly and unwittingly contribute to furthering the ignorance of American society. When faster is preferred to factual and catchy comes before accurate, integrity is first to go.
Social media is a powerful tool and information spreads quickly. Lets all demand better, lets commit to fact checking Facebook posts and ensuring that hilarious memes are properly attributed on our Instagram posts, while continuing to flatly ignore MySpace.
Beware the cautionary tale of aggravating aggregating, work hard and don’t take shortcuts and for the love of all that is good and holy don’t feed THE FAT JEW.