3/24/2023 0 Comments Angry giant cheese puff![]() ![]() It’s non-traditional as hell… Josh is the smartest person I know, for sure.” 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. We also have an animated show in development. “We expected to do 10,000 bottles for the summer. “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. Ostrovsky really does own a wine business – White Girl Rosé. He is constantly thinking about ways to monetise and brand himself.” He has a social media empire, a very successful wine business, a television career, and now he has written a really impressive book. He is a true businessman in every aspect of the word. 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. We are here to talk about Ostrovsky’s new memoir, Money Pizza Respect. “Do you think Josh might come inside so I can interview him?” I finally ask one of his publicists. 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. Ostrovsky has done it perhaps dozens of times. 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. On 13 August, for instance, the Buzzfeed writer Ben Rosen tweeted a photograph of a man in a restaurant having dinner with his dog. On 2 August, after Magwood published an angry blogpost about the plagiarism, other comedians came forward to say Ostrovsky had lifted their jokes, too. He literally cut and pasted the joke, cropping out Magwood’s name. ![]() He had plagiarised it, word for word, grammatical error for grammatical error, from the comedian Davon Magwood’s Twitter account. Photograph: thing is, this wasn’t Ostrovsky’s joke. Josh Ostrovsky at the spinning class he staged for homeless people in New York. 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. I want the homeless people of New York to have really gorgeous bodies.”). 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. 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. Fans include Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Kanye West and millions of teenagers. On Instagram, as he has 6.4 million followers. 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. 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”. 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. 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. He’s wearing a hoodie, novelty sunglasses and a gold necklace that reads “Life” in Hebrew. T he 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. ![]()
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