That Guy Fieri Parody Site Is Full of Ripped-Off Jokes

The parody website Guy's American Kitchen & Bar has gotten a lot of buzz since yesterday, but it turns out that nearly every single joke was appropriated without credit from a bunch of different sources. The scope and variety of sources is impressive, with jokes culled from Twitter, the Simpsons, even (bizarrely) photo captions on Gothamist.

Call it a remix, call it stealing, or call it plagiarism — are tweets protected? — but in any case, there's a total lack of attribution. The site was set up by the developer Bryan Mytko — yesterday he tweeted, "Guy Fieri didn't register his restaurant's domain name, so I picked it up" — with the artwork and copy apparently created by Pauline Vassiliadis. After a firestorm on Twitter, Mytko backtracked: "Big ups to @a_girl_irl and @DinkMagic for the tweets. This has been a blast. I had no idea the stuff was theirs so just giving credit." So Mytko initially took credit for the site but then blamed someone else for the site's content. At 2:46 AM he tweeted: ":: drops mic ::" Mytko has not responded to email inquiry.

Last night @DinkMagic tweeted a whole series of examples of jokes re-used by the fake website. For example, @DinkMagic tweeted in November: "Guy Fieri presents Jesus Kissing America on the lips: A leather bag full of fried oil." It was then twisted into this:

Or then there's @AutisticPet, who tweeted in November: "guy fieri's panamania: it's just a deep fried dead snake with a printed out picture of david lee roth on it." It then became:

And then there's @a_girl_irl, who posted a fake menu of their own back in September. It included the dish "Guy's Thighs" made with "jalapeno sugarbrew" and "The Big Guy Burgre" made with "a cinnabon, and two more cinnabons." Again, it ended up on the Fieri site:

The thread "Turdlord goon steals jokes off Twitter, domain name squats Guy Fieri" on Something Awful also goes into intense detail about the lifted jokes. For example: One of the jokes even lifts a photo caption from a Gothamist post from December, "Red Cross Delivers Trashbag Of Broken Hamburgers To Sandy Victims," that reads "The warm, broken hamburgers were in a clear plastic bag enclosed in a larger, black plastic trash bag." The menu item on the parody site reads:

More joke lifting will probably be uncovered. Here's a graphic on Something Awful that purports be a screengrab of an email Mytko sent. It reads in part, "I barely use Twitter and have no idea who @Dadboner @a_girl_irl @Dinkmagic @Lowenaffchen etc. are. If any of the content was stolen from them, well, I don't know what to tell you. Laugh at the menu or don't."

· Website of the Day: Guy's American Kitchen & Bar Parody [-E-]
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