Mike Carlton’s Twitter Game Is Off The Hook

Mike Carlton is a 68-year-old columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, best known for hosting the drivetime and breakfast timeslots at 2UE for a number of years.

As a well-known media personality with generally progressive views and an active Twitter presence, Carlton attracts a lot of negative attention from conservative keyboard warriors and other people you just somehow know not to sit next to on the bus.

He deals with it in a fairly rigorous manner.

Politics aside, it is a rare and refreshing contribution to the debate to hear someone telling someone else that they could be better spending their time off Twitter, fucking pineapples.

That Tweet piqued my interest, so I went back through some of his older ones to get a better feel for his unique style.

In 2007, Carlton's fellow 2UE presenter and longtime rival Stan Zemanek, a right-wing shock jock of the Alan Jones variety, died of a brain tumour. When asked if he would set aside their feud to attend Zemanek's funeral, Carlton replied: "I'd only go to check that he was actually dead".

Whatever your opinions about that, you cannot deny his commitment to the YOLO. This man does not give a fuck.

That's him chatting to David Oldfield, one of the brains behind One Nation. Note how Carlton tags @smh (ie. his bosses) in a Tweet where he calls someone a "ridiculous little pissant". Dude loves the word "pissant," incidentally.

Here he is just calling everyone a dickhead:

The best part about that last one, for me, is the lack of explanation. Why does Gerard Henderson think he is a dog? Is this why Mike Carlton doesn't like him? Did Gerard Henderson wake up one day in the body of his labrador John Galt, leading to some hilarious and ultimately heartwarming Freaky Friday-style escapades? No one knows.

(Update: apparently Gerard Henderson has a blog called 'Media Watch Dog', where he genuinely writes as a dog. It sounds shithouse.)

I thought I'd have to dig a bit to find this many, but none of these Tweets are more than a month old. He has more than 7,000 of them.

If he keeps this up, Mike Carlton will insult one in every 12 people on Earth before he dies.

I would move to a cave and sleep on my own body hair to avoid the possibility of ever being insulted by Mike Carlton if I didn't know I would wake one night, shivering in the cold, to see a black shadow looming over my inert form whispering, "You know who lives in caves? Pissants."

You can find Mike Carlton at @mikecarlton01 if you like being simultaneously entertained and terrified.

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Alex McKinnon is a Sydney-based writer and journalist, and former editor of The Star Observer.

This piece was originally published on his blog: alex-mckinnon.com.