The Fat Jew’s Kingdom Tumbles Down

Comedian Josh Ostrovsky – AKA ‘The Fat Jew’ – has seen his comedy kingdom destroyed by plagiarism accusations.

It would appear that The Fat Jew‘s rise to fame will be snuffed out as quickly as it started. For weeks now, Josh Ostrovsky has been under fire for stealing jokes, pulling the rug out from beneath the social-media phenomenon.

Joke-stealing is an unfortunate part of comedy that will never go away. It’s often hard to prove whether a gag was actually stolen, or whether two people simply had a similar, funny idea. Regardless, while I’m more ‘Dad bod’ than fat, as a fellow Jew, I was rooting for Ostrovsky – that is, until he was exposed as a fraud.

After he landed a deal with big time talent agency CAA, joke-theft accusations came in a flurry from high-profile comics like Patton Oswalt and Michael Ian Black. Perhaps more damning was the media storm, with The Hollywood Reporter, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post tearing Ostrovsky apart in quick succession.

As a result, The Fat Jew lost a TV deal with Comedy Central, and pre-orders for his upcoming book are nearly non-existant. Though his once-anticipated book is due for release soon (November 3), “Money Pizza Respect” currently ranks as the No. 42,957 best-selling book on Amazon.

An additional intriguing angle to all this is that Ostrovsky built his Fat Jew comedy empire in the most modern way possible. He essentially just mined the internet for jokes, aggregating the results into sketches and routines. He’s like a human SEO device.

Shame on you, Fat Jew!

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