About

Pizza Rat Man refers to a series of videos of man in a rat costume pulling pizza around a subway station, remaking the Pizza Rat video from 2015. The rat, called Buddy the Rat, is played by performance artist Jonothon Lyons.

Origin

On September 18th, 2015, New York City standup comedian Matt Little recorded a video of a rat dragging a slice of pizza down the stairs at the First Avenue L train station in Manhattan. On September 21st, Little uploaded the video to his Instagram and YouTube accounts with a bemusing description comparing the rodent to Master Splinter from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (shown below). Within the first 24 hours, the video garnered over two million views.

On October 28th, 2020, TikToker @maryamkhwaja0 shared a video of man in a rat costume prowling the New York City streets. The post received more than 2.9 million views, 733,000 likes and 10,000 comments in less than one months (shown below).

Spread

On October 30th, 2020, Instagram user @jonothonlysons, who played the rat, shared the video on his page.^[1]

The following week, on November 6th, @jonothonlyons began posting the subway videos on TikTok. The first clip received more than 179,000 views, 7,200 reactions and 50 comments in less than one month (shown below, left).

On November 8th, @jonothonlyons published the parody of Pizza Rat. The post received more than 200,000 views, 16,000 reactions and 300 comments in less than one month (shown below, right).

On November 17th, former professional basketball player Rex Chapman shared the video of the Pizza Rat parody, with the caption "I love New York…" The post received me than 6.9 million views, 162,000 likes and 43,000 retweets in less than two days (shown below).

I love New York… pic.twitter.com/0z5uaf9iTO

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 17, 2020

As of November 19th, 2020, the #buddytherat hashtag received more than 27.8 million views.^[2]

Several media outlets covered the videos, including Mashable, ^[3] Hyperallergic,^[4] The Daily Dot, ^[5] Forbes,^[6] Newsweek^[7] and more.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References