In news that shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise to anyone with a passing familiarity with actual jokes or any degree of skepticism where the internet is concerned, yet another comedian is mad at Instagram users Fuck Jerry and The Fat Jew for stealing his jokes.
Comedian Davon Magwood tweeted this joke last week in the wake of the internet’s Cecil The Lion-related outrage:
That joke was quickly re-posted without attribution by both Fuck Jerry’s Elliot Tebele and the Fat Jew’s Josh Ostrovsky, both of whom are Instagram “personalities” with millions of followers. (Tebele even left a grammatical error Magwood made in his post.)
Magwood, in turn, posted an open letter to the two sites on his website, saying that “if it’s my stuff you’re posting, and you give me credit, then I get traffic to my site, maybe that traffic goes to my comedy album and then I get paid for my work,” noting—though he shouldn’t have to—that he’s “not producing shit so [other sites like Fuck Jerry] can make money off of my work.”
Other comedians have chimed in on the theft, with Kumail Nanjiani noting the (horrible) irony that a “White guy (@Fuckjerry) [stole a] joke from black guy (@DavonMagwood) about what it’s like being black.” Kyle Kinane retweeted this June 2014 post from fellow comedian and TV writer Patrick Walsh where he calls out the Fat Jew for his joke theft.
In a more recent tweet, Walsh said Ostrovsky and his ilk steal jokes “because they’ve learned it’s a quick path to success without talent,” noting that when the comedian called him out a year ago, Ostrovsky’s response was fairly flippant.
(It’s worth noting that Ostrovsky has since put a “@DavonMagwood” on the lion-related Instagram post in question here, for whatever that’s worth.)
When reached by The Daily Dot for comment about the whole Magwood incident, Tebele said he’s “never heard” of the comedian and that he “find [sic] the post on a random meme Instagram.”
Lest this whole thing seem like a “oh, it’s some dumb internet thing. Who cares?” type of deal, it’s worth noting that both Fuck Jerry and The Fat Jew have more than 5.5 million Instagram followers each. Ostrovsky has been called the “King of Instagram” and, at least according to Billboard, can command $2,500 from a brand for a single mention on his social feeds. He was also recently on Candidly Nicole, in case you want to see what a horrible person acts like in real life.