Too Much Nick

Does Anybody Remember Laughter?

[BIG CAVEAT THAT’S A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT: I WROTE THIS TOO QUICKLY AND SOUNDED A LOT HARSHER THAN I MEANT TO. THE WITTY PEOPLE ON TWITTER ARE EXTREMELY FUNNY, FUNNY ENOUGH THAT I WANT TO BECOME FRIENDS WITH MOST OF THEM BASED SHEERLY ON THEIR TWITTER MESSAGES. ALSO, MOST OF MY TWEETS ARE MEDIOCRE.]

fireland:

To be honest, there’s a part of me that’s actually looking forward to April Fool’s Day on Favrd. I think it just might be the tipping point, the moment where all comedy is finally sucked into a black hole of its own making and we have to start all over again from scratch, drawing a penis in the dirt with a stick and gesturing at it with a desperate grunt.

No one else is gonna reblog? All right, I’ll do it, you pansies.

What I’m getting from this is, Twitter comedy sucks. The way all comedy sucks. Most of it isn’t funny to me. And no one gets a second chance to polish their routine and only show us the good stuff. That’s just not how the platform works.

But I do think we can all try harder. Compared to most of the other Twitter wits, Fireland is a god. Only two others come to mind: Sween and ScottSimpson. All the rest of us, hilarious as we can be, fall flat on our faces more often than these three.

I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how long they hold and hone a joke until they release it. From talking to him, I know that Scott is just off the cuff more brilliant than almost anyone I know. That comes from years of absorbing the culture around him, and a lot of other stuff that maybe he’ll write a blog post about some time.

I wish people made fewer puns. Puns are artificial jokes. Very clever puns become something other than puns.

I wish people made fewer sex/drinking/loneliness jokes. Those are great topics! But when people joke about them too often, they get lazy. The mere implication that you’re lonely or alcoholic becomes the joke. This is the Twitter equivalent of Dance Cook. You need more than a recognizable situation!

I wish we scrapped all the joke formats. “Related:” and hashtags and “I’m asking for a friend.” It’s just knock-knock jokes. The usual exception applies: if you really surprise me and upset my expectations, I might actually smile.

I wish people took bigger risks. Mike_FTW spent days acting like an idiotic innocent, the whole joke resting on the context of Mike’s usual surly, cynical attitude. Avery Edison, who will hopefully not hit me when I meet her, writes a lot of duds — because she stretches to write fantastical fictions and turn herself into an unreliable narrator. She’s the Babe Ruth of Twitter: swing and miss, swing and miss, then knock it out of the park with “What’s the deal with deaf people? Like, HELLO?” FakeSarahPalin took 2008’s most obvious celebrity impersonation and made her soar by making the character lovable. Every time she yelled at YOU STUPIDS!!!, I felt my heart melt a little for the real jerk running for Vice President. What separates satire from snark is the affection at the heart of the former.

That said, you all make some damn good jokes. Twitter is the worst place to find comedy, except for everywhere else.

I am a young and inexperienced comedian. None of the above is good advice. Carry on. Thank you for reading.

Mar

2009

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