#temporailylazyandpermanentlytired
Could you do a 100 Worst equivalent for Reddit? Probably. There’d be two problems, though, Firstly, it’d involve having to go to Reddit in the first place. Secondly, there’s a major difference between Twitter and Reddit. Twitter fame is gained by producing content, Reddit fame is gained by reacting to it. It’s the OC vs copypasta debate that governs internet fads writ large. Reddit is a place where your entire status is based on image management, if your reputation is tarnished too much everything you say will be downvoted into the gutter. And one way people have come up with other managing their Reddit Karma is through one of the worst cultural trends of the past decade: comedians self-meming themselves.
Let me explain. So imagine your parents treated you poorly enough as a kid for you to grow up into a stand-up comedian. These days, you know any half-decent gag you tell will be cannibalised and posted around Twitter, Tumblr and 9Gag without accreditation by the time you get your second “Would I Lie To You?” invite. So what can you do? Well, if you’re a modern comedian, you take a shitty photo of yourself and write the joke over the top of it with Roflbot, including your name and Twitter account with it. You don’t need me to tell you why this is terrible, but it shows that the internet is a hard place for comics to prove any worth. They have a whole new medium out there. They have a new landscape they need to carve an identity in. What can they do?
Well in the case of Rob Delaney, they can plumb every depth imaginable. Let’s clarify something from the off: if Delaney didn’t exist, nothing would be better. Someone else would be in this spot, someone else would be doing the same schtick, someone else would represent comedic failure. Rob Delaney as a man is just a terrible hack. The concept Rob Delaney represents, however, is actively poisonous.
Why is Twitter comedy bad? It is based around taking a solitary original idea and then hammering into the ground over and over again, and no matter how hard you drill down you never strike oil. So once there was a funny “football manager talks about pop culture and his sex life account”, now there’s thousands. Once there was a funny “imagine if this TV show was still on the air” account, now there’s thousands. Twitter knockoffs, the comedy equivalent of going into a seaside town poundstore and seeing all the “Transformbots” and “Spongefish Bob” toys for sale, made solely out of Shenzhen’s finest polypropylene.
It’s the same with “weird Twitter”. Indeed, one of the most cringeworthy moments of humanity’s 250,000 years on the planet was Buzzfeed’s “oral history” of Weird Twitter. A hagiography of a group of people who are, at root level, some dudes who are stupid enough to pay money to use a message board. But some of the guys namechecked in that piece were some of the funniest on Twitter, forging a humour style that merged self-knowingness, skewed cuteness and old school internet misanthropy. Of course, nothing good lasts and by the time they started using their real names and faces and talking to us about politics and earnestly tweeting about Dashboard Confessional, it was time to hit the “unfollow” button like it was a “Krypton Factor” challenge.
And in the middle of this… Rob Delaney. How did he get to become a public face of Weird Twitter? Actually, not even that: how did it get to be that anyone who wanted to break past that 2,500-follower mark had to be cosigned by him? How did he get to be the person who decided if your jokes about bees would be seen by a wider crowd? People were sitting around and lighting votives in prayer that Delaney would come through and blow their Favstar account up. Why did he do it? Delaney, like most (all?) stand-ups, is a man driven by an ego spotted with contusions. If you mention him on Twitter at all, he will hunt you down and passively aggressively favourite your tweets. No need to @ him, just say “Rob Delaney”. And he’ll come running.
But this is a side issue. You judge a comedian on one thing (unless you’re Lindy West and you’re writing the same terrible article for the 400th time in your tragic, empty life): are they funny? And no, Rob Delaney is a terrible comedian both on and off Twitter.
Comedy 101: comedy writing is poetry not prose. All words have to count, all lines have to have the correct rhythm. And this is why Twitter should be ideal for this. You only get 140 characters to play with, so you have to cut away every single thing that is unnecessary. Comedy in its purest form. And this isn’t an impossible task, a lot of the best jokes in British TV history fit into a tweet:
- “I don’t mind giving a reasonable amount, but a pint! That’s very nearly an armful!” – 82 characters
- “Are you now or have you at any time been a practicing homosexual?” “What, with these feet? Who’d have me?” – 103 characters
- “Trigger, while you were staring at those girls I’ve fell through a bar hatch. Let’s leave immediately.” – 103 characters.
See? It’s not that complicated. Now, let’s review a random Rob Delaney thigh-slapper (368 RTs, 780 favs as of press time) and see how it compares:
- “Another reason you #teens should be nice to me is that I could afford to buy you & your whole “crew” lunch at Chipotle with my pocket $.” – 136 characters
What’s interesting is that, to Delaney’s mind, he couldn’t cut anything out of this. He even had to use an ampersand and a dollar sign to replace “and” and “money” in order to get it all to fit. Now, why is this a bad joke? It’s not just because it doesn’t have anything actually funny in it. Read it over in your head. You probably don’t earn a career from comedy, he does. You noticed what’s wrong with it? There’s no emphasis pause. It’s literally a joke with no timing. And comedy sans timing is… well, the internet really.
We’ve spoken about the paucity of this comedic style before in the Mary Charlene entry (she now writes for “Bob’s Burgers”, vindicating us entirely). All you need to do is randomly rearrange the words “twerk”, “pug” and “bacon” in a sentence and you can hit on something that could be used by these guys and RTd by the sort of person who thinks that Cracked.com is “edgy”. Hey, if you want to go further, why not also try sending abusive bullying tweets to the low-paid workers at major corporations because, fuck them, they don’t have a DVD out. Do they even lift (a microphone up when recording a terrible faux-improv podcast)?
And then Twitter bleeds through into the real world. And then people who have no vested interest in sucking up to you to bump their follower counts get to judge your comedy. And then you get invited on the Jimmy Kimmel show and bomb harder than the Avro Lancaster. We can’t embed the video of Delaney’s performance on Kimmel because he has repeatedly gotten it taken down from YouTube due to embarrassment. However, here it is on whatever “Metatube” is.
I cannot watch this all the way through. Maybe after two minutes it turns into “Why Bother?”, who knows? But it’s a man re-enacting his Twitter schtick in a real life environment and being shown up for the utter hack he is. And again, no concept of timing whatsoever. A stand-up comedian who is nervous on stage in front of what must be the softest audience in world comedy. Humiliating for him as a man, humiliating for us as people who understand comedy.
But back to where we started. The internet and stand-up have something in common, the constant battle between coming up with something new that may not work or sticking with repeating what does work. In the old days a classic gagsmith-style comedian would write maybe 15% of his material, the rest being stored in the memory from the routines of other people. Rob Delaney isn’t a classic gagsmith. He isn’t a classic anything, and he certainly can’t craft a joke. He doesn’t steal from comedians. He steals from comedy. He kills comedy. And things are only going to get worse if he and his ilk go on to have lengthy careers. If anyone needs me, I’ll be watching Dave Allen YouTubes and counting down the hours until society comes to its senses.
Sample tweets:
“nice ham sample”
“If there’s anything cuter than a farting baby, keep it away from me or I’ll eat it.”
“One cool part of QOTSA show last night was seeing Trent Reznor & Jack White in the audience watching rapt like every other fan.”