When I first met Nick he was a fresh faced blogger who wore hooded sweatshirts. Now he’s a bearded blogger who plays (what looks to be) speed-bananagrams while wearing suits.

Early Friday morning, I reblogged Nick Douglas and contributed my thoughts on making mistakes as a writer in the wake of the throw down between Mike Monteiro, Mat Honan, and Caroline McCarthy.  It got me thinking about my own mistakes.  I’ve made a few.  The most publicly embarrassing was probably being called out by the happiest man alive, Andrew W.K., for making an absurd amount of typos in an interview I did with him.  In terms of personal shame, my interview with Nick during the promotion for his book, Twitter Wit, holds the top spot.  I had just moved to Berkeley and was starting to land gigs.  I was simply brimming with confidence and held the always dangerous belief that I knew exactly what I was doing.  This piece was analogous to the time I crashed my car after saying that there really wasn’t all that much to learn about driving.  I have no problem admitting that I fumbled the submission process terribly.  More embarrassing is the fact that I put my own interests before the interests of someone who took a fairly large chunk of time out of their day for a complete unknown.  As time drifted by and people grew more Twitter savvy I found myself at a loss for how to proceed.  The piece was cannibalized and redone several times and simply got away from me.  I doubt that the lack of progress even registered on Nick’s radar.  Shortly after we spoke he appeared on Martha Stewart’s show so I’m pretty sure some people heard about his book.  You can also find his writing all over the web and he is currently an editor and blogger at Urlesque. I’ve had different jobs and new deadlines in the interim but I can’t help but be distressed by the fact that he gave me a great interview and I botched it.  At least once every two weeks I pull out my notes or the transcript and sigh.  The web’s climate has changed a great deal since we spoke.  Favrd is down, Twitter has multiple monetization strategies, Facebook proved that they are more than willing to compromise user experience for money.  But Nick was saying all this in August ‘09.  He noted the value of archiving tweets and now they’re in the Library of Congress. I’m not saying Nick went to James Billington, Librarian of Congress, slapped him in the face with Twitter Wit, and screamed, “Do you see!” until he included every bit of content the site produces.  What he did do was give me a bunch of insightful comments about Twitter that he expected me to promulgate as widely as I could.  I failed to do that.

This is not a straight “from the vault” type post but I have kept the first introduction I worked on in the hopes that it might provide a sense of how much things have changed in the last year alone in respect to Twitter being a completely accepted service.  It took me two Thanksgivings to make my family and our friends understand what the damn thing was and now they love explaining it to me.

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While some focus on the transformative potential of Twitter from the news to education, its detractors have deemed it an expression of our nation’s self absorption and attention seeking behavior taken to their extremes.  As parents complain that the youth is losing their ability to spell and compose a proper sentence, Nick Douglas sees a renaissance in the art of the one liner.

Twitter is unarguably a growing force in almost every aspect of our lives.  A Twitter ticker on news stations is now almost as common as the stock ticker or additional story updates and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to read a paper or watch a sitcom without at least some mention of the service.  Even the next iteration of Xbox Live will integrate Twitter functionality.  Although there has been a great growth in interest and usership, many people still don’t understand exactly what they can be getting out of Twitter.  Nick Douglas has put a lot of thought into that very subject.  As a founding editor of the tech industry site Valleywag (of Gawker Media) it was practically part of his job to try every online service out there and examine their encouraged user behavior and effectiveness.  Nick has been on Twitter since the beginning when “it was just something the geeks played on,” and while he can talk at length about things like Twitter’s lasting power and competitive edge against Facebook, his most recent project focuses on the unique way that Twitter lends itself to humor by collecting some of the funniest one liners across genre and subject.  While Twitter Wit itself may be seen as a “joke book” it is clear that to Nick Douglas the existence of this book is a reflection of a significant transition taking place in how we communicate and our humor itself.

Although his career brought him into contact with countless services that originally promised great change and tiny, focused, revolutions in user behavior only to fizzle out, Douglas saw something evolving on Twitter.  “I noticed more and more people specifically trying to entertain instead of just fulfilling the basic purpose of saying what they were doing.  These were people who were thinking about the audience they were writing to instead of, ‘I’m writing something for myself,’ almost as a personal diary.  Twitter Wit works in a way that Blogger Wit wouldn’t really or Facebook Wit doesn’t even work, even though they’ve got some very similar features.  You just don’t get huge numbers of people on Facebook trying to be really funny.”

The beautiful thing about Twitter is its simplicity and the almost absolute lack of direction its creators give users.  While feature happy third party apps abound for the service, the actual web UI looks like it might have been designed by an ascetic hermit.  (If ascetics had internet.)  Conventions like the hashtag and even the RT are all derived from user invention and implementation.  The genesis of this book depended on the integrated “star” or “fav” feature and the user communities that arose as a result.  “Favrd definitely changed the game for me,” says Douglas.  The now defunct service tallied the number of stars users had been awarded for their individual tweets and displayed them in rank.  “It changed how people were tweeting because suddenly there was a goal in mind: get the most stars, land on the top of this page, and be commemorated for that day as the funniest person of the day.  Turning it into a little contest, like so many things online, really upped the ante of how people were going to behave.”  In addition to encouraging content creation, it presented a more manageable way to find that content.  Previously, Nick had simply been starring tweets he liked by reflex but he was still limited by the fact that he had to depend on his own follow list or hope that his friends retweeted material they’d enjoyed.  Sites like Favrd and Favotter allowed users to increase their visibility.

This democratizing aspect of Twitter that allows everyone from housewives to college students access to their own audiences has been touted much in the same way people pointed to Youtube celebrities a few years ago.  “I do see Twitter as an equalizing platform.  Granted, the same network effects are still in play.  A famous person is always going to get more followers by default, versus someone who can be funnier than that famous person that just doesn’t have an audience.  People aren’t just reading to be entertained purely by what the tweets are, they also want that feeling of connection with whoever’s behind them.  There’s nothing magical about Twitter that would override that.  And yet, at the same time, like with Shit My Dad Says, you can see that a good idea does get a lot of attention in a way it deserves.  [More than followers] What really is important to me, as far as a sign of attention on Twitter, is whether people are saving your tweets.”

Perhaps even more importantly, the favoriting system has turned Twitter into something greater than a broadcasting tool.  “I’d like to see starring become more of a standard thing on Twitter that people know to do.  You start being able to track what’s good and what your audience likes and actually hone your craft.”  The conventional comments system on a blog will typically skew towards the negative but Douglas notes that it doesn’t necessarily present an honest picture of audience response.  “More people are going to want to explain in words why they don’t like what you wrote than why they did.  It’s always harder to say a coherent positive response when you really just want to go, ‘Yay! I agree.’  Having the “likes” and the stars which are integrated on Tumblr, Flickr, Youtube, Amazon etc. gives people a chance to show their appreciation without having to rack their brains for specific nice things to say.  It’s also important to get followers who are interested in talking to you.  I think that’s one of the really valuable things here; you’re not just doing standup in front of a crowd, you’re doing something that’s participatory.”  Instead of chucking dead ends or throw-away jokes out into the Twittersphere, comedians should be viewing Twitter as a testing ground or joke incubator.  It is increasingly common to see conversations start on Twitter only to be followed up by full length blog posts or articles.  Similarly, there is potential to select excerpts from longer works as a sort of “proof of concept” for the premise of a joke or story.

And here we enter the realm of craft.  The development of characters and a commitment to voice are probably the best argument anyone could offer for Twitter developing into something recognized for having literary characteristics or properties.  It is an interesting time, as writers on Twitter are still shaking out various approaches for creating accounts that invite investment from followers.  Writers must decide to create an account for a singular type of joke, to create an account using their own persona or a fictional one, to stick to perhaps a limited number of subjects or let fly as ideas come to them.  Authors like Arjun Basu, who tells self contained short stories in 140 characters or less, are something of an anomaly but that is not to say that there isn’t an abundance of story driven tweets.  Particularly interesting is the way that behavior is evolving.  While Douglas said he observed that writers developed characteristic voices early on, as personal style is almost impossible to keep out of creative work on Twitter or any other service, it took quite a bit longer for the now popular character accounts to develop.  “I’d say those cropped up almost a year after Twitter started.  I’m sure there were some but they were primordial.  The really good ones took a while.  Darth Vader was an early one but that’s a much simpler account.  It’s very much the standard jokes for someone impersonating Darth Vader because that’s been a trope for decades.  It’s a very easy persona for someone to get into.  Fake Michael Bay is the first [sophisticated] one I can remember, or Fake Sarah Palin might have come first.  The really interesting part about those characters is that they’re always better when the person goes beyond the first, immediate, joke.  It’s the sort of thing they did at MAD magazine a lot.  They would push beyond the obvious thing you could say about a celebrity.  What the Fake Sarah Palin account got was not just that she was ill equipped for her political career, or not just that she was a dumb bible thumper, but that she was so self-assured about how right she was.  It wasn’t just that she didn’t realize how dumb she was, it’s that she thinks everyone else is dumb when they disagree with her, and that’s what was magical.”

When confronted with the conventional wisdom often taught in creative writing classes that an author should find their favorite line or scene and kill it,[1] Douglas doesn’t hesitate for a second, dismissing the advice as “simplistic.”  Much of the comedy taking place online experiments with the short form, he says.  Shorter formats like video sketches or tweets reward artists who can come up with one or two of those killer lines.  Twitter is arguably the shortest of forms.  Whether working in puns, like Jay Hathaway; mimicking conservative politicians, like Avery Edison; or simply being diabolical, like Joshua Allen, each tweet produced is inextricably linked to the negative space around it.  The form’s brevity requires cues from the authors that hint at a world outside the tweet.  Douglas describes Allen’s skill in being able to “imagine an entire short story and taking the one killer line from it.”  The whole story is still there, he’s just let it fall away.  The seemingly instantaneous aspect of Twitter also makes readers wonder about the physical context of the tweet.  While a writer my go through numerous drafts of a tweet before publishing, the fact remains that it is a one off, created at a specific moment to be enjoyed by an audience as soon as the author deems it ready.  Since a tweet can be sent from anywhere, and generally carries a tone of observation, it is not unlikely that a reader might wonder exactly what went on behind it.  Was Jay Hathaway really making a hot pocket at the exact moment you read his hot pocket joke?  The fact that a tweet can be multifaceted and create so many different types of associations in the mind of readers makes the case for tweets as compelling art.

Consider @firleand’s tweet from May 10^th “— end of side one — ” There is a visual component to the composition of the tweet that sets it apart from anything else in the reader’s feed and replicates the sense of separation from content that these messages used to carry.  While the tweet receives a significant boost in meaning to those who follow Allen’s Tumblr as being something relating to his own life, the tweet still works as a message from a fictional character or the last line in an imagined novel.  These four words are rife with dramatic tension and gain in poignancy for every moment that they are not followed by another tweet.  If we were to view the entirety of this feed as an artistic endeavor, this tweet, and the space surrounding it, would be the best exercise in pacing I’ve ever seen on the service.

How important then is the 140 limit, the restriction that creates the form?  140 has become something of an arbitrary hot number these days.  You may have seen the 140 Second Film Festival that limited films to 140 seconds of footage.  While it is true that the limit was adopted to leave room for the user names of those who submitted by SMS, or text message, which brings a limit of 160 characters, this was not always the case.  Initially, there was no character limit at all.  Any overflow would be separated into a second message and submitted subsequently, just as a normal text message sent to another cell user would be.  Similarly, there is nothing to stop someone from writing a story or joke in 10 consecutive 140 character long segments.  I asked Douglas what he thought about users simply ignoring the limit.

“It could be less elegant, maybe,” He said.  “In any format, people that can work within the structure of the format are often going to produce more immediately elegant things.  But, if you can tell a story over several tweets by paying attention to when you’re breaking up the narrative then you can do something really interesting. You can put the punch lines in the second tweet.  You’re forcing comedic timing in a medium that usually seems bereft of any timing.  What’s more artless to me is when people abbreviate.  I’d much rather someone go into a second tweet than type in rebus language.  It distracts.  That definitely kills the feeling of humor, and I had to edit a few of the tweets in the book because they were brilliant except they left out a couple of punctuation marks, or shortened a word too much, just to fit in the character limit.  It’s always better if you can, instead, change your actual words.  If you want to be Hemingway you can’t just make the words look shorter, you have to actually use fewer words and still manage to get the idea across.”

Even if they were to get past the invention of the internet, the old guard would doubtlessly still be shocked at the concept of such brief stories.  Even Henry Youngman, king of the one liners, would have a hard time understanding how Twitter could usher in a new type of one liner joke.  Twitter’s hash tag system allows users to track all the tweets associated with specific tags.  For example, you could search #presidentialdebate and follow the entire community’s reaction to a debate.  Douglas points out the value of such a feature not just for academic purposes but for humorists as well.  The jokes based on memes and trending topics are “a unique form of humor that wasn’t technologically possible without this one tool.  Someone just starts a joke with a simple and easy to replicate formula like, ‘mashed up movie titles,’ or, ‘things I’d never say,’ and you can follow the tags and read hundreds of variations of a certain type of joke.”  Twitter seems to be making everything new again.  It’s not too long ago that a book of crowd sourced one liners would have seemed an unlikely pitch at best.  Now Douglas predicts that before long, we may very well see entire books based on a single day’s jokes from Twitter.   I sure hope so, there’s an empty spot on my bookshelf next to F U Penguin.

[1] Attributed to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the form of “Murder your darlings.” from On the Art of Writing

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When I first met Nick he was a fresh faced blogger who wore hooded sweatshirts. Now he's a bearded blogger who plays (what looks to be) speed-bananagrams while wearing suits. Early Friday morning, I reblogged Nick Douglas and contributed my thoughts on making mistakes as a writer in the wake of the throw down between Mike ...

Tags: humor, nick douglas, one liners, twitter