Surprise, the social media agency behind Fyre Festival chronically steals other people’s work
Even though it took place nearly two years ago, wreckage from the Fyre Festival continues to spew forth from its vainglorious corpse like rocket-propelled maggots. There are the lawsuits and prison sentences and Ja Rule trying to save face in light of two viciously competing documentaries on the subject. There’s also, within all of this muck, renewed attention being directed at Jerry Media, the marketing agency that promoted the train wreck (and subsequently denied any culpability for its failures despite aggressively suppressing online concern). That company, it should be noted, was born from a joke-stealing Instagram account called Fuck Jerry.
Fuck Jerry, the brainchild of Elliot Tebele, has managed to become enormously successful (and profitable) based on the practice of stealing other peoples’ work and posting it on its own page. Tebele and company are still doing this—calling to mind another meme they could repackage as their own—despite years of call-outs.
Credit Vulture comedy editor Megh Wright, then, for working to break the inertia that keeps Fuck Jerry going. This week, she’s been spreading awareness of the account’s self-enriching joke theft, imploring everyone to unfollow it while sharing the #FuckFuckJerry hashtag.
Wright’s also shown the reasoning behind her approach in a longer thread posted yesterday that breaks down how building a company off of other people’s jokes actually works.
This isn’t the first time Fuck Jerry made these kinds of headlines—the account has garnered attention for doing the same shit before—but Wright’s concentrated efforts to hurt ’em in the follower count seems like one of the only ways to truly make a difference.
Her work has picked up plenty of steam throughout the week, gaining support from comedians including Judah Friedlander, Akilah Hughes, Jonny Sun, Paul F. Tompkins, Patton Oswalt, Marcia Belsky, Tim Heidecker, and Vic Berger.
In Berger’s case, an especially personal rip-off from back in 2016 highlights how enormously shitty the company’s behaves, even when a comedian informally asks them to provide credit.
Wright shows no signs of stopping her noble campaign to take down Fuck Jerry, which is both long overdue and a welcome new development in the renewed Fyre Festival fallout.
Seriously, fuck Fuck Jerry.
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