The internet sensation and now memoirist Josh Ostrovsky, aka the Fat Jew, is 15 minutes late to meet me, which is annoying because he’s actually chatting with a friend right outside this coffee shop window. He’s wearing a hoodie, novelty sunglasses and a gold necklace that reads “Life” in Hebrew. He’s a big man with a shaggy afro which, when he spends time on it, can be manipulated into a kind of unicorn’s horn. Today it’s not a horn. People recognise him. Passersby look impressed. We’re in an area of Brooklyn called Dumbo, and I’m sitting inside the cafe with two of his publicists, who insist on being present throughout the interview. It is all weirdly corporate, given that Ostrovsky’s an Instagram comedian; but last March, Time magazine named him one of the “30 most influential people on the internet”.

He started out as an entertainment reporter and a member of the rap group Team Facelift, but since 2013 Ostrovsky has become increasingly famous for his vastly successful memes and viral videos. On Instagram, as @thefatjewish, he has 6.4 million followers. Fans include Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Kanye West and millions of teenagers. Consequently, as Time explained, “brands have started to pay him for exposure to that audience”; these brands include Stella Artois, Burger King, Apple and Budweiser. Some of his videos are perceptive and funny: for example, when he staged a spinning class for homeless people on Citi Bikes that weren’t in use (“Indoor cycling is not available to everybody. I want the homeless people of New York to have really gorgeous bodies.”). When the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer incurred the internet’s wrath for shooting a much-loved lion while big-game hunting in Zimbabwe, Ostrovsky posted on Instagram a photograph of the cowardly lion from The Wiz with the caption: “Going to start dressing like a Lion. That way cops know that if they kill me. White people will avenge me.”

Josh Ostrovsky at the spinning class he staged for homeless people in New York. Photograph: @thefatjewish

The thing is, this wasn’t Ostrovsky’s joke. He had plagiarised it, word for word, grammatical error for grammatical error, from the comedian Davon Magwood’s Twitter account. He literally cut and pasted the joke, cropping out Magwood’s name. On 2 August, after Magwood published an angry blogpost about the plagiarism, other comedians came forward to say Ostrovsky had lifted their jokes, too. On 13 August, for instance, the Buzzfeed writer Ben Rosen tweeted a photograph of a man in a restaurant having dinner with his dog. Two days later the same photograph appeared on Ostrovsky’s Instagram account with the identical caption: “Just a man enjoying a bottle of wine on a romantic date with his bulldog.” And so on. Ostrovsky has done it perhaps dozens of times. I would like to ask him about the plagiarism, but he’s showing no sign of finishing his conversation with his friend/business associate outside.

“Do you think Josh might come inside so I can interview him?” I finally ask one of his publicists.

“I’ll text him,” she says.

We are here to talk about Ostrovsky’s new memoir, Money Pizza Respect. It begins, unusually for a comedian’s autobiography, with an endorsement (from the singer Tyrese) that highlights his business flair: “Josh has accomplished a lot of things over the past few years. He is a true businessman in every aspect of the word. He has a social media empire, a very successful wine business, a television career, and now he has written a really impressive book. Like me, he is an ‘Ideas Man’. He is constantly thinking about ways to monetise and brand himself.”

Ostrovsky really does own a wine business – White Girl Rosé. “It launched 4 July weekend,” his young manager Alex Ferzan tells me a few days later when I visit him at his home in Los Angeles. “We expected to do 10,000 bottles for the summer. We did 100,000 bottles in six weeks. We also have an animated show in development. We’re working on a perfume. There’s the plus-sized modelling [Ostrovsky recently signed with the modelling agency One Management]. And we’re devising a non-traditional live experience called IRL, where people will come to a venue and see a performance based on music and entertainment. It’s non-traditional as hell… Josh is the smartest person I know, for sure.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Brands approach me because they want to get nuts and reach millennials.’ Photograph: Steve Schofield

After Tyrese’s endorsement, the book begins with Ostrovsky “sitting in the office of my literary agent (hahahahahaha I have a literary agent, why??)” waiting to sign his book contract. “The fact that someone would actually pay me real dollars to write a book makes me LOL, hard.”

But his agent reassures him that he does indeed deserve a book contract: “‘You really earned this deal. You’re really talented,’ my agent told me.

“I mean, I guess I kinda earned it by building up a big audience on social media, but writing a whole book seems like a fucking daunting task.”

Writing a book is indeed a daunting task, and I don’t think Ostrovsky ultimately meets the challenge, given much of it consists of stories about his penis. He grew up wealthy, in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His mother, Rebecca, was a nutritionist, his father, Saul, a radiologist (they’ve since retired to New Mexico). He attended the private school Trevor Day and became a child actor, appearing in ads for Hershey’s chocolate syrup and French Toast, a clothing company. He skips over much of his childhood in the book, though he focuses heavily on the night of his bar mitzvah when his father, concerned he might be gay, took him to a strip club.

I was one of the first people on the internet to sit in food. I never put my name to it or said “This is me”’

In one of the more gruelling passages, Ostrovsky flatly recounts how, on family vacations, he would secretly masturbate in front of world-famous landmarks: “Stonehenge was amazing. The best jack-off session that I’d ever experienced in my life.” Then there were “the Egyptian pyramids (behind a helicopter on a landing pad – I’m dead serious), the Leaning Tower of Pisa the following year (alone, at night, on the lawn, baggy sweatpants)…”

Ostrovsky was expelled from two universities – Skidmore College and New York University – before graduating from the State University of New York at Albany with a degree in journalism. By then he was performing in his rap group and beginning his ascent to celebrity. At no point in the memoir does Ostrovsky refer to plagiarism, but he does detail other stunts he pulled to attain online fame. Such as the time he posted on his YouTube channel a video of a sex worker sitting on his back reciting lines from Braveheart: “‘You don’t even need to fuck me,’ I clarified. ‘Just put this paint on your face, take your top off, ride me like a horse, and read the lines. Then I’ll pay you.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The post Ostrovsky lifted from Davon Magwood. Photograph: @thefatjewish

Then Ostrovsky gets serious: “I’m an influencer. Companies pay me to put their product on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, so the teens who follow me will buy said product. The much more awesome component is when I get sent to events, sponsored by a brand, to do absolutely nothing. A few months ago, Stella Artois called and asked if I would fly to France to attend a bunch of parties they were hosting at the Cannes film festival.”

The book ends on an ominous note: “Here’s the deal. I’m the future. All the real adults who are reading this book may not want to accept it, but I’m telling you, it’s the truth. Yes, most people over 50 don’t understand what I do for a living or take me seriously, but does that really matter? They are all going to be retired or dead soon, and they won’t be able to say shit about the way the world is run.”

He’s not a child: he’s 33.

Ostrovsky’s publicist finally reaches him by text, and so he comes inside and sits down next to me.

“Did you really masturbate at all those world-famous landmarks?” I ask him.

“That’s really true,” he replies. “I was actually thinking about how I would never do that now. Even as wild as I am now, I’d be too scared.” He adds that he only included that passage because his co-author, David Oliver Cohen, encouraged him to incorporate some “pathos. He said, ‘Let’s go into your childhood. You have great childhood stories. Let’s show people you’re a fucking person.’”

“So Fat Jew isn’t a persona?”

“No, I don’t turn it off,” he says. “I don’t get home and read books and go to bed early. I get super weird at home, even when nobody’s looking.” He adds, “But I’m probably more thoughtful and serious than people think I am.”

“What do you think was going on with you psychologically when you were masturbating in front of the landmarks?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “That’s a great question. At the time I was just focused on it. It seemed like something awesome I should be doing.”

“I’m no psychiatrist,” I say, “but maybe you were insecure about your place in the world, and so you were trying to convince yourself, ‘I am someone. I can disrespect the pyramids.’”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “I’m not sure. I’ve definitely, in a Jew-y way, had a bunch of therapists, but I don’t think we ever talked about that. I don’t think I got any insight into that.”

“What kind of stuff do you talk about with your therapists?”

“Pretty much everything,” he replies. “I’ve got a plethora of problems. Aren’t we all, at this point, suffering from raging anxiety?”

The experiences we do are what people wish they could do. Like riding around in a convertible with a llama in New York

“What brings yours on?”

“OK,” he says. “As much as I love the internet, I sometimes get stoned and read through 30,000 comments and then I’ll be, ‘Oh my God. What is happening?’”

“You get overwhelmed?”

He nods.

“Do you panic?”

“I don’t panic,” he says. “And it’s cool that I’m impacting people one way or another. At least they’re talking about me. But there’s so much noise. I celebrate the noise, but there’s no simplicity in it. Sometimes I’d just like a moment of still.”

“Of course,” I say, “something happened to you in August where some anxiety was justified.”

He pauses. “Yeah,” he says.

To Ostrovsky’s credit, he does have a skill: he instinctively knows what will go viral. Millions look to him for memes. This is why (according to his management) he gets 20 to 40 approaches from brands every week.



“Most people with a large social media following will hold up a can of soda, take a picture, put it out, boom,” he says. “You’ve fulfilled your contractual obligations. But kids can spot when they’re being targeted from a mile away. They’re highly averse to it. And that’s not what we do. Brands approach me: ‘We want to get nuts and reach millennials!’ They love buzzwords. ‘We want to get in the Fat Jew business and go nuts!’ So a brand like Craftsman Tools says, ‘We’d like to do something different.’ I say, ‘OK. Superbowl Sunday. Build me with Craftsman Tools a giant bowl filled with chilli. I’ll sit in it and watch the game and I’ll have people sprinkle onions and cheese on me.’”

The Instagram image of him sitting in a Craftsman Tools bowl of chilli currently has 63,500 likes. The comments include “Pure genius” and “F*ck yeah” and “Don’t know where you live, but I wanna go there…” To put this success into context, an Instagram photograph I posted of my dog looking like the Girl With A Pearl Earring currently has 239 likes.

Ostrovsky in a bowl of chilli, a sponsored Instagram post for Craftsman Tools, which got 63,500 likes. Photograph: @thefatjewish

“I consider myself a little like an ad agency, I guess,” he says. “If this were 25 years ago, I’d probably be working at an ad agency.” It’s not a surprise that his wife, Katie Sturino, with whom he lives in TriBeCa, Manhattan, runs a successful fashion PR company, Tinder.

Before Ostrovsky stole Magwood’s cowardly lion joke, it had been shared a few thousand times. After he stole it and put it on Instagram, it was liked 197,000 times. He’s very good at recognising images that, as he tells me, “bring us all together. That’s what memes have become – the thing that connects us. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 6ft 5in Crip or my mom, we’re all, ‘Yeah. When I get drunk and go into the bathroom and look in the mirror, that is kind of what I look like.’”

How does he look for memes?

“It’s just based on the moment,” he says. “We’re so momentary now. Every second is the ultimate zeitgeist. So you narrow it down to those tiny moments. You just have to know the internet. You have to love it so much. You have to want to fuck the internet.”

The problem is, Ostrovsky apparently venerates internet fame to the extent that he doesn’t care who gets ill-treated along the way.

Before setting off to Brooklyn, I telephoned Magwood at his home in Pittsburgh. He told me how he discovered the plagiarism: “A bunch of my friends started tagging me in his Instagram post. Some of them told me he’d been stealing jokes for years.” And so Magwood wrote a blogpost: “You make money from the traffic you generate and guess what, I’d also like to be paid and credited.” For him, it was open and shut. “If you steal people’s jokes on stage you get tarred and feathered.”

The response to his blogpost disconcerted him. “People were saying to me, ‘It’s the internet, man, you shouldn’t be taking it so seriously.’ One guy unfollowed me because he said I was taking it too seriously. I don’t even want to be on social media,” Magwood added, exasperated. “But I have to, to promote what I do.”

The idea that plagiarism is entirely acceptable internet behaviour turns out to be unexpectedly prevalent. In March, the hugely influential US television news anchor Katie Couric interviewed Ostrovsky for her Yahoo channel. It was a cosy, almost deferential interview. Perhaps Couric was afraid that if she struck any other tone she’d seem like a relic from the pre-social media age. At one point she asked him about the joke-stealing allegations. “The internet,” Ostrovsky replied, “is like a giant weird orgy where everything gets shared. It’s kind of like we’re all on ecstasy at a giant rave.” Couric seemed satisfied with the explanation.

Watching it, I shared Magwood’s irritation. Plagiarism is a hurtful act, on the internet, too.

“It depends where you’re coming from,” Ostrovsky replies when I tell him this. “I’ve been sharing stuff for years and not asking for credit, because I believe in that ideology.” He gives me an example: “I was one of the first people on the internet to sit in food. We’d fill a Jacuzzi with all kinds of food. We sat in 200 McDonald’s cheeseburgers. The thing became a meme. And it was shared everywhere. I never put my name on it or said, ‘This is me.’ People copy me constantly, from my hairstyle to my videos. I am all about the communal sharing.”

“Everyone is entitled to an ideology,” I say, “but I guess we’re learning that you shouldn’t force yours on to other people.”

“Or let’s just have a discussion about it,” he says. “There’s no need to villainise.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Steve Schofield

Ostrovsky did, eventually, suffer a sustained attack after Magwood’s blogpost appeared in August. The initial indifference was replaced by a growing fury, once sites such as Rolling Stone and Splitsider gathered myriad instances of his plagiarism. The writer Maura Quint wrote: “The people he steals from are struggling writers, comedians, etc. They would love to be able to profit from THEIR OWN WORK but can’t because this complete waste of a person is monetising their words before they even have a chance to.” Comedians mocked Ostrovsky’s defence that he wasn’t a plagiarist but an “aggregator”: “My favourite Jane’s Addiction song is Been Caught Aggregating,” tweeted comic Patton Oswalt. Others, hearing that Ostrovsky was developing a Comedy Central pilot, bombarded the channel: “You are supporting content theft by supporting him.” The language deployed against him veered quickly into bullying. He was frequently referred to as “garbage” (“Who is this garbage?”) a dehumanising phrase often used during a Twitter shaming. (I’m sure lots of the people who criticised Ostrovsky commit their own, more socially acceptable, acts of internet thievery – file sharing and the like. It’s not the same, but it’s not not the same.) Then Splitsider announced that a Comedy Central representative “confirmed with us that the network no longer has a project in development with him”.

“It was clickbait hell,” Ostrovsky tells me. “There was a lot of misinformation. They said they pulled my TV deal over this, which was just blatantly untrue. I had killed that deal a month earlier.” (A Comedy Central rep later confirms in an email to me: “The decision not to move forward from the script deal stage of the project was made well before his Twitter controversy occurred.”) He is visibly angry at the memory of how the internet got this side-issue wrong. But then he remembers his unconditional regard for the internet and adds: “I love everyone on the internet going crazy and screaming. That’s how the internet works – like a giant gladiator arena. But the conversation still hasn’t been had about where all this should go.”

At the end of the day I’m Jewish and pretty nice. I’m just trying to party

“Well, let’s have that conversation now,” I say. “Do you think in retrospect the comedians were right and you were wrong?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t think anyone’s right and anyone’s wrong. I know that sounds flaky and diplomatic, but it’s not that kind of issue. What if both sides are right and we’re finding the happy medium now?”

“What’s the happy medium?” I ask.

“The happy medium is the way that I’m doing it now,” he says. “I stood up to the plate. We went back and credited it all.”

In August, Ostrovsky and his people did indeed retroactively credit every stolen joke. He promises that in the future he’ll only post images where he can credit the source. “The internet is deep and dark and weird,” he says. “The phone’s in my hand and I’m driving and smoking a cigarette and trying to find the source of something, and sometimes it’s hard to find where stuff comes from. But you have to do the proper due diligence.”

“But that’s all the comedians wanted,” I say. “Due diligence. So it sounds like you’re saying they were right.”

“No, I’m definitely not,” he says. “I’m saying that everybody had a voice in the conversation and there were points from each side that were valid.” He suddenly looks angry and says: “Due diligence. Just like what I’m saying you have to do when you write an article online. Do some fucking research.” He’s referring to the erroneous implication that he lost his Comedy Central deal because of his Twitter shaming.

Ostrovsky has always claimed to see the internet and real life as two wholly different entities – a somewhat disingenuous belief, I think, given that his online success has many real-world benefits. But it seems as if his shaming really has made him see things differently.

“The real world and the internet are basically the same thing now, right?” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “I think people have grown sick of the internet being so uncivilised and want it to be more livable in.”

“There must be some guidelines,” Ostrovsky agrees. “You don’t want it to be governed, but you don’t want it to be completely savage.”

It’s a shame that it took him being hurt to realise how it feels to be hurt.

“Look,” he says. “I wish the whole thing hadn’t happened [but] I think it was a moment in internet history that I was a part of. At the end of the day I’m Jewish and pretty nice. And I’m just trying to party.”

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A few days pass and I am in LA. Ostrovsky is here, too, having his photograph taken for this story, and so I go along. The shoot is at his manager’s uncle’s house in Encino, an affluent suburb in the San Fernando Valley. It’s an extraordinary house with its own working wiffle ball stadium – Strawberry Field Park. I sit with Alex, his manager, and we watch him clown around.

“The experiences that we do,” Alex says, surveying his beautiful floodlit stadium, “are what people wish they could fucking do. Like riding around in a convertible with a llama in New York City. ‘Yo! I got a llama in a Chrysler Sebring! I drove around New York City like a boss!’ Everything Josh does is aspirational.”

The photo session ends, and Ostrovsky and I sit on the plastic seating that overlooks the stadium. He says he has a team of interns in Queens, helping with the wine business and starring in his videos: “People stop them and say, ‘Oh my God! You’re the person who got shot with a matzo ball out of a T-shirt cannon!’ Kids are really anxious to intern for me. I tell them, ‘Don’t do it if you don’t want it to get a little bit crazy.’”

But then something a little odd happens. He turns serious and tells me how his young interns don’t realise how morally imperative it is to credit every image in every meme. “They don’t understand. They’re just like, ‘Whoa, this is hilarious!’ They’re not thinking about the guy who created the joke and is just trying to pay his fucking electrical bill. I’m not necessarily going to make that guy money by tagging him. But if I tag him and his numbers grow and someone notices, then I could be.”

This is a different Ostrovsky to the one I met a few days ago. Back then, he was coming to terms with the new way of behaving. Now, it’s as if he has assimilated the condemnation levelled against him, to the degree that he’s restating it back to me as his own long-held wisdom. It’s almost like plagiarism – but this time for the good.



• Money Pizza Respect, by Josh Ostrovsky, is published by Hardie Grant Books at £15. To order a copy for £12.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com, or call 0330 333 6846.