A Deep Dive Into ‘Hoozdis Fatguy’, One Of Facebook’s Oldest And Weirdest Meme Pages
This page will make you remember how weird the internet was in 2008.
Hoozdis Fatguy, the weirdest and best fictional page on Facebook, is an introvert.
He’s a Libra like Kim Kardashian. He wants to be more present for his daughter. He’s a 9/11 truther.
Hoozdis is 70 percent your dirtbag cousin who spends his weekends getting drunk, playing video games, eating pizza, and hunting. He’s 20 percent that guy from high school who posts rants that he thinks are super insightful but actually make no sense.
He’s 10 percent your mom who owns at least one piece of Live Laugh Love merch and uses Facebook to share nostalgia memes, Marianne Williamson quotes, and fake news.
Add a sprinkle of Da Share Zone energy, and that’s Hoozdis.
Who IS Hoozdis?
I learned about Hoozdis in September 2008, when a friend sent me a link to a Myspace page featuring several Photoshopped memes: Hoozdis imposed on a photo of a fisherman getting inked by a squid; Hoozdis in a 9/11 hoax photo; Hoozdis on a fluffernutter sandwich.
There had even at some point been a party where guests dressed like Hoozdis (someone special-ordered the goggles from a German toy manufacturer, or so I was told at the time).
Later that same day, I connected with Hoozdis on Facebook.
Hoozdis’s creator, whom I’ll refer to as George (George was reluctant to use his real name, citing concerns about “active warrants”) told me Hoozdis got his start when a friend sent him the photo and said “we need to find this guy.”
They hoped the real Hoozdis or someone he knew would contact them.
“We just wanted to drink some Bud Light with him,” George says. George and his friends would also “share theories about what the guy’s life was like, and that persona served as the basis for the Facebook page.”
The Internet Was Weird In 2008
The whole thing was goofy and homegrown, and learning about it felt like being included in an inside joke that was about to go viral.
The internet was a different place in 2008, one that can be hard to remember now that everyone and everything is so online. Rickrolling was still big, as were LOLcats.
Know Your Meme, Stuff White People Like, Hootsuite, and The Daily Beast all launched in 2008. Social media was still relatively new: Twitter and the Facebook newsfeed both debuted in 2006. Instagram and Snapchat didn’t even exist.
In 2020, it might seem somewhat problematic to take a picture of a real person and base a whole fictional persona on him, but at the time it wasn’t that strange. Most people who became memes in 2008 didn’t set out to go viral.
The rules were fewer and looser. We were all still figuring out what sharing our lives through social media could or should look like.
“Pretty Standard Status Updates For A Binge-Drinking 20-Something”
In the beginning, the Hoozdis Facebook account posted more ridiculous photoshops and pretty standard status updates for a binge-drinking 20-something.
He posted about looking for a weed dealer, and getting drunk, and being fat. Hoozdis was dumb, and melodramatic, and a little bit of a troll. He often “poked” his Facebook friends.
Some of the groups that Hoozdis invited me to join in 2010 include “BARACK OBAMA: NATURAL BORN CITIZEN?” “Coyote Hunting = Patriotism,” and “I hate when I get a boner and it pokes another hole in the Ozone.”
I was in my mid-twenties. I was also dumb, and melodramatic, and too often oversharing online. I found Hoozdis pretty amusing.
the american dream
My Google Chat logs from these early years are peppered with mentions of Hoozdis.
In 2011, I wrote to a friend that Hoozdis had been writing parodies of the type of Facebook post that often made me roll my eyes.
What I noticed right away was that when other people — my relatives, people I went to high school with — posted this stuff, I hated it. But when it came from Hoozdis, I loved it.
He made the worst parts of Facebook funny.
I shared these examples, which aren’t online anymore with my friend (some of the official Hoozdis record has been lost to account deletions over the years):
Ok Facebook… Coffee’s not kickin in … I need something to make me smile or laugh right now… Hit me!
Why is it that 3rd world countries are now living the american dream and we are becoming the 3rd world country…thank you govt for allowing our jobs to go over seas…i wish i could understand your logic behind this one.
FB is scarey… I see too many people posting personal stuff.. I’ve got a high school friend who is in California… posted that she’s gone for 2 weeks. I’m wondering if ANYTHING will be left at her house when she gets back.
An Avatar Of Facebook Itself
“When it started,” George says, “I thought of him more as a complete party animal, so the posts were about that. Now he is more of an echo of his Facebook friend group.”
George says that Hoozdis is “an expression of Facebook itself, how it influences a personality in certain ways and molds that part of you in its image.”
If you’ve been on social media at all, you have an almost primal sense of what type of content appears on each platform. Facebook is for complaints, earnest old people, birth and funeral announcements, and minion/Jesus memes.
It turns out that it’s not at all a coincidence that dirtbags, oversharers, and meme mums are the people Hoozdis reminds me of — these are also pretty much the only people still active on the Facebook newsfeed, where George is taking inspiration.
But George is also making fun of himself: George says he knows he should probably just delete Facebook, but “since I can’t seem to do that, [the account is] partly me parodying the part of me that feels compelled to keep using something I know is a waste of time.”
Everyone’s Always Asking Hoozdis, But Not Howzdis?
Sometime in the mid-2010s, I took a break from Facebook for a couple of years. I came back in 2018, and that’s when I realized Hoozdis was still there and still posting — kind of a lot, actually.
I’m a person who quits things — creative projects, hobbies, any kind of organised social group — early and often, so I could hardly believe that Hoozdis had been at it for more than 10 years.
Most people with an 800-follower joke Facebook account would get bored at some point, get a more demanding job, have a kid, and hang it up. But Hoozdis was still there, churning out posts almost daily.
What kind of person runs a Facebook account for a non-real person for over a decade?
In his communications with me, George was almost the anti-Hoozdis. He quoted Walt Whitman. He expressed a wish to have been born a “19th century British eccentric” so that instead of working he could spend all his time on “ornate creative projects of limited interest or utility.”
George also isn’t even close to the only one doing long-term acting on social media. Lots of people run accounts for fictional characters, though it’s pretty rare to find a character like Hoozdis who’s totally unattached to any existing intellectual property and isn’t spawned from a pop culture event.
The only other account I could find that didn’t fall into one of these two categories is Twitter’s @dril, who also started tweeting in September 2008 — right around the time Hoozdis was born.
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
— wint (@dril) June 2, 2014
As I talked to people about Hoozdis, @dril kept coming up. Hoozdis and @dril serve the same function on their respective platforms: they both mirror how we behave when we post.
And as for why they both popped up in mid-2008, maybe it had something to do with the bleak state of the world (September 2008 was the month Lehman Brothers tanked, ensuring the global financial crisis that had been brewing for months).
drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,
— wint (@dril) May 9, 2014
Maybe we were all holed up with nothing to do except use the internet and be anxious. Maybe it was a moment uniquely ripe for someone to realise that we all play characters online, whether we intend to or not.
The Future Of Hoozdis Fatguy
Hoozdis has already been around for more than a decade, so what happens next?
George says he’ll keep going until Facebook deletes the account (though he’s already survived at least one deletion). Each of the character social media accounts faces its own challenges when it comes to longevity, but the timeline for any of them is potentially indefinite.
The Twitter account for the big hat that Pharrell wore to the Grammys in 2014 doesn’t post often anymore, but did have something to say recently when Billy Porter showed up to the Grammys in a pretty spectacular hat.
Someone with 1400 followers has been tweeting since 2011 as a bear that used to hang out in a suburban Buffalo, New York neighbourhood. The bear was killed by police last year, but the account is still posting as the Ghost of the Amherst Bear.
If I were still alive I’d really love all this fresh snow to roam around in.
— Ghost Of The Amherst Bear (@TheAmherstBear) January 21, 2019
Hoozdis has a lot in common with these accounts, but Hoozdis doesn’t need to wait for someone to wear a big hat to make a post. We — the folks on Facebook — feed him.
I suspect some core of Hoozdis will always stay the same. He’ll always drink Bud Light, and be fat, and love terrible memes. And he’ll always be there to turn our nightmare, cringey, eye-roll inducing Facebook posts back into something fun no matter what the future holds, as long as we’re still online.
Sandra Schmuhl Long is a writer and editor in the Washington, DC area. Follow her on Twitter: @sandra_s_long.