April 27, 2010
Twitter, or the Ubiquitous Soul of Henny Youngman
I’ve been away. Waxing a boat in Long Beach Island, digging up stones in Syracuse, taking an all-expenses paid culinary tour of Toronto. No joke. This is the kind of thing I do when I’m not…blogging or tweeting. I still hesitate with words like “blogging” and “tweeting.” Just ten years ago, I’m sure such terms would have sent a ripple of blushes through a bathhouse. Now they’re acceptable ways to spend the day.
I’ve taken to the blogging. I enjoy it enough that I know I’ll keep at it. Twitter is another story. It’s not that I think Twitter is slumming it. Heck, Margaret Atwood tweets her Canadian ass off and I’m sure Toronto likes her even more than they like me. No, Twitter is intimidating. Twitter is humbling. And I suspect it strikes fear in the hearts of all stand-up comedians. Let me explain.
The purpose of Twitter is to sell things, be it products or people. And there are three different ways to go about it.
Some folks broadcast their every thought. It caters to their inner three-year-old. I tend to stay away from this type of tweeting, because honestly I don’t think people want to know that I had peanut butter and crackers for a snack or that I like puppy dogs better than kitty cats or that I really gotta pee. If I were Levar Burton, over one and half million folks would dig hearing that sort of stuff, but as it stands, there are only 50 or so kind souls who follow me and they know I don’t have that Burton swagger.
Others use Twitter to sling the latest news. The New York Times has better foreign offices than I do, so I don’t try to beat them at that game. Next time Maoist eunuchs overthrow Djibouti, you probably won’t hear it here first.
The only other reason to use Twitter is to crack jokes. And that’s primarily what I try to do (other than trick people into checking out my blog). Usually I see a headline or a wacky bit of news. I come up with a one-liner, sometimes provide a link. And I hope that one or two of you crack a smile. The wheel of karma turns back my way. Until, of course, I go out and tease some local orphans and have to repent with another smile-inducing tweet.
It’s all very exhausting, and the problem with what I do on Twitter is that everyone else is doing it too. Many are doing it much better. Look at today’s news. Etiquette expert Elizabeth Post died. Randy Quaid and his wife were sent to jail for a bizarre litany of crimes. Joe Boxer bought Charlie Brown. Surely quick witted tweeters have already ribbed these subjects thousands of times in any number of clever ways. Even if I did have a good joke on deck (which I don’t), I’m not a fast enough typist to get a digital copyright on it.
If she were alive today, Ms. Post would surely tell you that if someone else has already cracked a similar joke about Mr. Quaid on Twitter, then you should defer to that humorist, even retweet them as a sign of respect. As you might guess, not everyone follows this etiquette, and Twitter is full of plagiarists who steal jokes word for word and pass them off as their own. Stand-up comedians are livid!
But it’s comedians who will end up the defendants in any copyright cases. When IrishStallone36 or HappyKelly! have already done a Charlie Brown in boxer shorts joke, a similar joke ain’t gonna work as well for Patton Oswalt a week later at the Kansas City Giggle Factory. And if it does, then HappyKelly! is going to be ranting on her blog about how Ratatouille stole her thunder. With thousands of people joining Twitter every day, the next generation of comedians will have to go completely obscure or absurd if they have any hope of surviving in our tweet-happy brave new world.
And me? I’ll just have to give up entirely. There’s always boat waxing to fall back on.
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