The Kardashians of Queens

How a cheeky community college dropout and his unsuspecting family became neighborhood celebrities—and YouTube’s next big thing.

Photos by Kyria Abrahams

“Parents aren’t disciplining their kids enough! So the kids can just run around and they don’t care. They’ll do whatever they want and get away with it because their parents don’t do anything.”

So pontificates Joe Santagato, eager to criticize the populace for improprieties that have produced irresponsible, overly dependent and needy young adults. “I know how to keep my kids in line,” he goes on, employing the present tense, even though the twenty-year-old community college dropout from Astoria, Queens, doesn’t have any kids of his own yet. “My kids don’t need phones or computers. If you’re a little kid, what do you need a phone for? Who are you going to call?”

It’s this type of self-righteous, quick-witted humor that has made Santagato, the founder, proprietor and featured performer of the YouTube channel SantagatoTV!, the unlikeliest of web celebrities.

“I just don’t go to the mall anymore. It got weird,” says Santagato, whose channel has more than 128,000 subsc…