A Survey of The Best and Weirdest of Weird Twitter

What is Weird Twitter? This is a question that has been asked dozens of times across the Internet. As per usual with anything cool, sites like The Daily Dot set to answering this question first. Then the Huffington Post got on board. Then finally somebody told Time about it, and we all got really bummed out because we knew that the word “millennial” would appear 40,000 times in whatever piece they ended up running on the topic, and now our Mom is going to ask about it next time she calls for iPhone tech support.

It is not my intention to define Weird Twitter, comment on its impact on the culture, or interrogate its origins. BuzzFeed already did it better than anyone else, so if you want to know the Weird Twitter origin story, read the brilliant oral history courtesy of John Herman and Katie Notopolous. It is impossible to define Weird Twitter just as it is impossible to define any artistic movement, and yes I do consider Weird Twitter an artistic movement. To me, Weird Twitter is at its best when it is subverting – or trolling – the way we are supposed to behave on the Internet. When these tweeters assault brands, mock the hip speechifying of their contemporaries, or take on the lazy smugness of Internet writing, they are at their funniest and most cathartic.

Weird Twitter is not traditional comedy. Weird Twitter isn’t about “What’s the deal with …” observational humor; Weird Twitter isn’t one-liners about politicians and celebrities; Weird Twitter isn’t in-joke references of current trends. Weird Twitter is absurd, subversive, and often keenly self-aware. Weird Twitter’s jokes are as much about form – niche, brief, Internet-speak – as they are about content. Weird Twitter shares something with the jaded one-liners that come from accounts run by dudes who work for Funny or Die or write at Splisider, but it also shares something with post-modern installation art. Of course, as with any movement, the best way to define Weird Twitter is to show you the work of those who do it best. So, Here is A Survey of the Best and Weirdest of Weird Twitter.

Though, before I get started, let me say that if I have to choose a favorite definition for Weird Twitter, I choose one offered by @methadonna: “Weird Twitter is the business major and the art major hate-fucking.”

@animaldrumss

Many of @animaldrumss best jokes take stale comedic fodder of the Internet world: millenials, inspirational quotes, nostalgia, Disney movies, technology, and the rest of Generation Y's preferred pop culture detritus, and turns it on its head, or more accurately, back on itself. By plunging tired, rote joke material into the realm of the absurd, @animaldrumss is poking fun at the way we communicate with each other, and in particular, the way we use Twitter.

His jokes are as much about the imagined teller as they are the subject matter: he alternates between the voice of an out of touch aging person trying desperately to joke a bout a world slipping away from their grasp (ex. "music's too complicated today with all the 'laptop' and uh 'computer laptop'. We need to go back to brasses, strings, woodwinds, percuss") to a younger voice that tries desperately to be profound, but just doesn't get it (ex. "I saw the best minds of my generation chilling at my house. The guys with the best minds are all my friends and they think I write good."). Regardless of the voice he uses, @animaldrumss comedy is about the thing we see so often on the Internet and in life: people trying desperately to relate to each other, but ultimately failing, their voices swallowed by self-consciousness and self-absorption.

@Löwenäffchen

Few Internet trolling hobbyists cast their net as far and as wide as @Löwenäffchen. Buzzfeed writers, Cory Monteith fans, NaNoWriMo, Benghazi conspiracy theorists: it seems if there is something on the Internet worth mocking, @Löwenäffchen will be there to mock it. One of my personal favorite @Löwenäffchen projects is youkickstartersucks.tumblr.com. It is, as you might guess, exactly what it sounds like. Along with fellow brilliant tweeters @dogboner, @VirgilTexas, and @boshj, @Löwenäffchen finds the absolute lamest and most ridiculous Kickstarters and serves them up for our delight. In the aforementioned BuzzFeed article, @Löwenäffchen ran down a list of celebrities who have blocked him and their reasons for doing so. From the list, it is clear that he is fighting the good fight. It reads as follows:

"- Dog the Bounty Hunter - threatening to put him in a diaper
- Roseanne Barr - calling her "a tool of the Zionist internationalist menace"
- Mark McGrath - accusing him of doing 9/11
- Uncle Kracker - accusing him of doing 9/11
- David Draiman - telling him I vandalized Disturbedpedia to say all the songs were about gay sex
- deadmau5 - don't remember
- Paul Kagame - don't remember
- Scott Baio - the diaper fiasco
"
- Nickelback - making fun of Chad Kroeger for being horny

@crushingbort

Political humor is difficult. Most effective political satirists either soften their attack by "going after everybody" like Jon Stewart or they speak through the voice of a character, like Stephen Colbert. @crushingbort is impressive because the account pulls no punches as the writer ruthlessly calls out conservatives, yet it finds a way to be consistently hilarious while doing so. "Horton Atonto" even manages to participate in trending political hashtags and come across as funny and thoughtful. His trolling of "#INeedMasculismBecause" with "...I took my annoyance at the wife always being smarter in sitcoms and fashioned it into a political philosophy" was picked up by several outlets and inspired others join in for some savage trolling. His commentary on fiscal conservatism (above) is probably one of the most elegant defenses of liberal economics I've ever heard despite its brevity. As conservative humor continues to be mean-spirited and unfunny, @crushingbort provides yet another rich, humorous voice of political commentary.

@kibblesmith

Onion contributor Daniel Kibblesmith's personal Twitter account (@kibblesmith) is hilarious, but it doesn't have the absurd, satirical bent of his side projects. Currently, Kibblesmith is behind two of the best bits on the Internet, @GarfbertComic and @GOPTeens. Both of them skewer media landscape in clever ways, though they have almost polar opposite comic sensibilities.

Garfbert, a parody of classic comic strips that combines the worst aspects of Garfield and Dilbert and adds a sense of existential dread, skewers old media. Whenever you find yourself growing nostalgic for the comic strips of old, just head over to garbert.com and remember just how terrible they were. Garfbert is written with a tone of depressing banality, but what is most hilarious about it is that it isn't that far off from the original comics it references. How often were Dilbert, Garfield, and the rest just drawings of sad, lonely moments in the chartacters' lives? Thinking about it is enough to plunge you into a Jim Jadams'-like depression.

Tonally, @GOPTeens is 180 degrees from Garfbert. @GOPTeens is written in an upbeat voice of a middle-aged copywriter trying to capture the voice of Generation Z. Pop culture references and hashtags fly rapid-fire from the account that just wants you not to forget Benghazi and realize that Ted Cruz is a national hero. Kibblesmith's past as a copywriter has helped him get the tone of @GOPTeens just right. Actual pundits (including Keith Olbermann) and real-life conservative teens have fallen for the bit, which makes the bit that much better. Kibblesmith has set up a t-shirt store so that all you patriots out there can score GOPTeens shirts of your own.

@boring_as_heck

[Full Disclosure: @boring_as_heck is a regular contributor to Four Pins, which is a part of Complex Media. However, as we are both freelancers, we have never met and probably never will, so that probably isn't a bid deal.]

Few people have found as many different avenues for Internet mockery as Stefan a.k.a. @boring_as_heck. The man is a bit machine, and with each passing month comes a number of new ways he twists the Internet to his hilarious and nefarious whims. Whether he is ruining people's fantasy mock drafts or channeling the boys of Entourage, his work tends to delight lovers of snark while angering bros who he taunts until they are reduced to pouting into their Bud Light Platinums. Though he loves making fun of sports and those who love them, he takes aim at various aspects of the culture. My personal favorite of his posts is a piece he wrote for Slacktory in 2013 entitled, "I Found Banksy's Notebook."

@boring_as_heck has a brilliant way of using the Internet against itself that results in an entirely ridiculous brand of social commentary. To call him a troll isn't going far enough; he is one of the few people who has elevated trolling to an artform. On Twitter, you'll often find Stefan retweeting masses of people who believe something that it's difficult to imagine one person thought, let alone dozens. One recent bout of retweets was brought on when a group of tweeters who didn't realize that the film Titanic was inspired by actual events. With so many brands, bloggers, and celebrities out there being terrible, it is comforting to know that @boring_as_heck is out there dishing out his personal brand of vigilante ownage.

@lawblob

Many Twitter users try to joke about current events. As soon as a celebrity dies, a sports league holds a playoff, or a war begins, Twitter comedians pull out their iPhones and go to town. This results in the same tired jokes about "orange slices at the World Cup" and "Drake eating ass" to be passed around the Internet until they are picked to the very last meme. @lawblob manages to walk a fine line wherein their tweets are commenting on the day's events and commenting on the commenters simultaneously. Whether the account is taking aim at bitter middle-aged tea partiers or millennial hypebeasts, @lawblob never fails to capture the sheer banality of the day's Internet conversation with a voice that stands out from the rest of the tired Internet crowd.

@trumpetcake

While Patricia Lockwood is the undisputed poet laureate of Weird Twitter, Ted Travelstead's work as @trumpetcake has its own sense of lyricism that brightens your day whenever you happen upon one of his tweets. @trumpetcake's feed reads like Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstein gone to seed. What if, instead of bright-eyed children, the worlds of these masters was populated with downtrodden hobos and creepy cousins with eccentric hobbies? That's the world the Travelstead thrusts us into with each of his playful and strange tweets. Like Lockwood, Travelstead has taken his particular brilliance to a variety of other mediums. He is an author several times over (his two published titles are Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk and The Petraeus Files: All the Photos, Chats, Poems, and Other Super-Secret Emails They Don't Want You To See), a legendary Viner, and recently wrote, directed, and starred in a short film.

@fart

Even if you don't follow @fart, you are probably familiar with his work. Though Jon Hendren is consistently hilarious with his mixture of brand mockery, intolerance for trendy web culture, self-loathing, and on-going discourse on pussy eating, he is at his best when his tweets take on a life of their own. The Internet loved it when Pitbull was sent to perform at a Wal-Mart in Kodiak, Alaska; Hendren (along with Dave Thorpe a.k.a. @Arr) had a hand in that. You may recall the time when the lead singer from Smash Mouth was forced to eat two dozen eggs for charity; Hendren had a hand in that as well.

In a way, Hendren's account is a laboratory for performance art, and the results vary widely in scope. Sometimes, his work ends with a little group trolling of famed morons. Other times, he is part of hijacking social media campaigns. Digiday has said of Jon, "If you're a social media manager for a major brand, Jon Hendren, known by his Twitter handle @fart, is your worst nightmare." Here's hoping that corporations never wake up from their bad dreams.

Finally, like @Lowenaffchen, @fart has offered up a list of people who have blocked him [via previously mentioned Buzzfeed piece] that we're sure has only grown longer since its publication:

"- Nickelback - I posted a daily Chad Kroger Horny Report detailing how many babes he was sexting via his mentions. he was doing it a lot for a while there.
- stone cold steve austin - I told him his head looked like a penis sticking out of a wal-mart shirt or something -
-danielle straub, "real housewife of New Jersey" - told her she looks like a cross between a dachshund and a skull
- wil wheaton - he posted some jerkoff thing about "Oh, a mysterious rocket launches and everyone just assumed it was Evil Wil Wheaton!" so i quoted that and said "shut up" and a bunch of people RTed it
- dog the bounty hunter - no idea why
- scott baio - for being associated with people trolling scott baio, i guess. i didn't do anything.
- jose canseco - i told him he wore a diaper for months but he never blocked me until i said something about his estranged girlfriend, i don't remember what
- @Lord_Voldemort7 - not really a famous person, but i'm proud that this loser blocked me for making fun of its shitty gimmick."

@tricialockwood

With the arguable exception of Rob Delaney, Patricia Lockwood is the breakout star of Weird Twitter. Though I have endless fondness for Delaney's tweets, he has a relationship with Weird Twitter that isn't unlike Weezer's relationship with nerd rock or Skrillex's relationship with EDM. What he produces is more appealing to the masses, those that aren't "in on the joke." Retweeting Rob Delaney is like retweeting The Onion. "We get it," we mutter to ourselves on the toilet, shaking our heads because we already saw that tweet an hour ago retweeted by, like, a dozen other people. Perhaps, if Delaney is the mainstream breakout standard bearer of Weird Twitter, then Lockwood is that underground band that long-haired guys at dive bars tell you that you should "really be listening too, man." And she just finally blew up.

Lockwood has a prodigious amount of output under her belt, including a novel, several collections of poetry, a viral poetry sensation entitled "Rape Joke," and a variety of published work across the poetry world and the witty blogs we all wish we read more of. It was her recent release of her collection of poems Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and subsequent profiles by The New York Times and The New Yorker that have made her a household name -– if only in households in New York, LA, Portland, and Austin in which one member of the household takes improv classes and another runs a social justice blog.

Lockwood is a bona fide poet in a Weird Twitter world filled with stand-up comics and bloggers. As such, she stands out in a sea of weed jokes, pop culture mockery, and corporation baiting. Her brand of absurdity has a lyrical, sexual quality that while speaking the language of irony is punctuated with an earnestness that most of Weird Twitter lacks. Though everything Lockwood writes, from her longform poetry to her shortest tweets, has an underlying wit, sensuality, and devilishly effortless grace, she is probably best known for her "sexts." In these tweets, she takes what is perhaps the crudest form of digital communication and endows it with visual, comic imagery that is at once savage mockery and pure poetry. Huffington Post has put together a gallery of their favorite Lockwood sexts, which you can absently click through here.

@dril

Every form has the enigmatic figure that even its best known practitioners look to with reverence. In music, there is the purist who refuses to sell out. In film, there is the uncompromising, if a little crazy, indie auteur. Twitter has @dril. If you scan the timeline of pretty much any Twitter handle with a sense of humor, you will find a tweet from @dril. I have seen some @dril tweets retweeted into my timeline dozens of times. His vicious satire of conservatives, gamers, conspiracy theorists, and other less savory aspects of the Internet is always on point, always hilarious, always in character.

Twitter loves @dril. @fart has said, “I have no idea who dril is but I think he might be a computer algorithm from the future.” Rob Delaney said, “The fact that people sort of revere Dril, is to me, entirely appropriate. That guy is just beyond.” In naming @dril a 2013 “Gawker Hero,” Max Read wrote, “Dril will not lie to you. Dril will not fool you. Dril is not a hoax. Dril is not a put-on. Dril is the only writer on the internet you can trust.”

Not much is known about the reclusive tweeter. Even his comments for BuzzFeed's oral history were given "in character." @dril is also one of few Twitter handles to have his own extensive Know Your Meme page. Here is what KYM knows about @dril, “Not much is known about the identity of the Twitter handle. It is known that dril used to be a user on the Something Awful forums who went by the nickname gigantic drill … [BuzzFeed employee Jacob] Bakkila shared that he was hired by dril in the past for a project, that dril was possibly a graphic designer and lived in the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut)." So, yeah, we don't have a lot to go on.

Unlike many of his Weird Twitter contemporaries, it seems unlikely that @dril will land a book deal or a Comedy Central half-hour. From what we can tell of @dril to date, he wouldn't want any of that. Whoever is behind the voice of @dril recognizes that the account is at its best as paranoid, ridiculous fountain of technospeak screaming into the winds of the Internet in lowercase letters sans punctuation. Any more knowledge of the man behind that smiling Jack Nicholson avi might just ruin the joke.