The Four Comedians You’ll Meet On Twitter

I just unfollowed Aziz Ansari. Love him in Parks and Recreation. Loved reading the New Yorker profile, where he hugs Beyoncé like a boss. But dude is not funny on Twitter. At pretty much any time, his last three tweets will tend to look like this:

“Go buy my new standup special online for $5!”

“I’m a guest on BLAH BLAH SHOW tonight at 9:37pm!”

“INTERNATIONAL CITY FOR EXAMPLE STOCKHOLM: I am touring soon!!!”

Man. Come on, Aziz! Remember the good times? How about ‘RealLifeDickParty.com’? Can’t it be like that on Twitter, too? Instead, you’ve become more like that boring Facebook person updating about their baby 95% of the time. So no can follow, Ansari; your good tweets get retweeted into my timeline anyway.

It’s not just Aziz. Lots of stand-up comedians are really disappointing on Twitter. Louis C.K. has even admitted that he sucks at it. (We appreciate the honesty.) I don’t actually blame them: why give away your best material on a platform people can access for free? And it’s totally fair to be promoting shows that your fans are interested in attending. Also, my Twitter timeline is still my kingdom: no one is forcing me to follow these people.

But I do still want some actual giggles on the Tweeter. As the Black Eyed Peas once said, ‘Where are the LOLs’? (Disclaimer: They didn’t say that.)

Over time I have sprinkled enough sugar into my timeline to ease the day’s long march, and I’ve come up with what I think is the perfect combination. I call it the ‘Twitter Comedy Pyramid’. The pyramid is arranged from top to bottom in terms of how much each category of users have successfully owned the form.

THE TWITTER COMEDY PYRAMID

Level 1: Hilarious Celebrities

At the top of the pyramid, you have hilarious celebrities. You don’t need many of these; just enough to remind yourself that celebrities are out there, and they are whack. In fact, you probably only need one: Cher.

Cher’s account is a palpitation-inducing delirium of ALL CAPS, emoji and terrible grammar. On paper, that’s just classic internet, but with Cher it’s more like a typist’s emotion apocalypse rather than a refined use of the medium.

Her heart is in the right place:

She sometimes shows a touchingly micro-level interest in her fans:

Or she pronounces her lefty convictions with HEARTFELT PRIDE and WEIRDLY INCONSISTENT ELLIPSES. The best:

See also: Kirstie Alley (very loose punctuation), Shaq (‘VERY QUOTATIOUS, I PERFORM RANDOM ACTS OF SHAQNESS’), William Shatner (‘Why isn’t Halle Berry on Twitter? Halle! Come to Twitter, Bill’), Jason Biggs (‘BABY NAME IDEA OF THE DAY: Porch’).

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Level 2: One-Concept Jokers

Beloved of the news media and all new Twitter users, one-concept jokers are an easy buy-in because they take a simple premise and run with it, in 140-character bursts. Famous, worthy examples are @KimKierkegaard (combining the wisdom of Søren Kierkegaard and Kim Kardashian) and @SeinfeldToday (modern-day Seinfeld plots).

My favourites, though, are the accounts that have created an original character — okay, I only really like the animal ones — and tweet in their voice.

@DoctorPug is the best. No need to explain: it’s a pug that is a doctor.

What is there not to like! The account’s avatar is a pixelated pug with a head mirror.

@coffee_dad is also the best. This ‘guy’ is an old dude who loves coffee and doesn’t get hashtags.

Admittedly, the gags here are not rocket science. They are not always funny or surprising, either; once a character has been around for a while the concept can get old — or the account inactive — and that’s a definite cue to unfollow. Still, funsies.

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Level 3: Twitter Comedians/Megan Amram

These users are also writing jokes specifically for the 140-character format, but we can engage more deeply with these comedians because, as identifiable human beings and not one-trick ponies, they are not bound by any concept or joke type.

They probably hate the ‘Twitter comedians’ label because they often write for other media, but screw that. Twitter is my favoured channel for these users because I don’t have to go anywhere to seek out their work, and they usually don’t pollute their feeds with shit about upcoming gigs.

The master of Twitter comedy is Megan Amram (@meganamram). For me, she may as well be the only person in this category. Oh alright, @badbanana, @briangaar, @DJRotaryRachel, @kellyoxford and @nealbrennan are great too, and if you haven’t witnessed any of Nathan Fielder’s Twitter-facilitated pranks yet, get ready to cry, because he is so much funnier than you.

Amram is a blessedly funny comic who edits her Twitter output but is also reasonably prolific, tweeting about once a day. Her way with the Tweetbird landed her TV writing jobs: the first was for the ill-fated but high-profile James Franco and Anne Hathaway-hosted Oscars, and she now writes for Parks and Recreation.

Her tweets are concise, cerebral and immediate: perfectly formed for popping up in a timeline. Written from ‘her’ point of view — that is, the ‘Twitter Megan Amram’ persona — her tweets reveal a personality that is wry, foul-mouthed and irreverent re: her Jewish heritage. Good times.

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Level 4: Weird Twitter

Two reliable suppliers of weird Twitter LOLs are @MrSpoonicorn and @jonnysun.

These users have taken the form to another, mutated, level. In short, they have won Twitter.

MrSpoonicorn has received almost 200,000 favourites on Twitter for ‘his’ (for all we know from its bio, this Twitter account could be run by anyone, or a team of anyones) jokes: a combination of imagined conversations and puerile fartish humour. Similarly, JomnySun’s tweets are always misspelt, with a sweet naivety and heroic ‘oh dear’-ness to them:

These Twitter comedians have been categorised as ‘Weird Twitter‘, a loose grouping described by Slacktory’s Nick Douglas as users with ‘more-complexly, more-interestingly, or more-experimentally written tweets’. They’ve sweated the fat out of bait-and-switch jokes and absurd statements to thrust them like tiny spurs into our digital funnybones. There’s also often a hurr-hurr element to Weird Twitter; something about these tweets hurl you into a kind of e-Beavis and Butthead hilarity hole.

Max Lavergne (@maxlavergne) is a local favourite who tweets in this style, but because we know who he is, there’s no ‘Weird’ mystery to him.

Many Weird Tweeters have lifted the Twitter humour game to another level of analysis and posterity, by subscribing to a service called favstar, which lists the user’s tweets in order of popularity.

This is pretty great for those of us who want to re-read some of our favourite jokes, because, obviously, Twitter is a super transient platform. But it’s also a trigger for endless requests from irritating and insecure comedians for favourites and RTs — soz guys, that warrants an unfollow.

Of course, as with any new iteration or presentation of comedy, there are noticeable lineage markers and downsides. Internet-users who were children in the ‘90s will recognise the asterisks (denoting actions rather than words) rife in Weird Twitter from the heyday of chat service mIRC, and sceptics will note that Weird humour can be puerile or offensive — punchlines often, disappointingly, involve terms like ‘boner’ or ‘gay’ — contrary to Douglas’s observations.

Still, if you’re following a few, you’ll see there’s a community feel to the interactions between these users, other Weird Tweeters, and their fans. It’s quite sweet.

The originality and unexpected playfulness Weird Twitter has brought to my timeline is something I’m very grateful for. Now all I have to do is filter out #QandA tweets and it will be perfection.

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Okay, so that’s the Twitter Comedy Pyramid. May you climb it well. Or perhaps build your own. Or create a scheme out of it to defraud people. Whatever, it’s your life.

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Estelle Tang is a writer and editor, a co-mouth at Flavour Palace and a bibliotherapist at The School of Life. Follow her at @waouwwaouw.