It’s 7am, I’m in my kitchen eating some Bran Flakes, and the self-described “male actress and comedienne” Peter Serafinowicz has just become the first person of the day to bid me good morning. He was also the last person to say goodnight to me yesterday. Okay, so he also said it to the other 275,000-plus people who follow him on Twitter. Serafinowicz is Mr Twitter: arguably, during its boom year of 2009, no famous person interacted with the social-networking site, or exploited its potential for humour, more successfully than he did. On average, Serafinowicz sends out about 10 tweets a day, not including replies. “I sometimes wish he would stop,” says a friend — a Twitter sceptic — in the comedy industry. “It’s obvious he just needs a big hug.”
Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, Serafinowicz tends to omit banal information about his day. His tweets play with cliché (“Sometimes I undress myself with my eyes. It takes a lot longer”) and display a fascination with language. Sometimes, he will ask his followers to throw out words around which he can spin a joke. The jokes don’t always work, but when they do — “Used to know a girl with multiple personalities, who was also very selfish. Always looking out for number eight” — you sense he’s hugely enjoying exploring how much wit and pith it’s possible to fit into 140 characters or fewer.
Even now, at a time when your grandma has probably heard of it, a large percentage of the population don’t “get” Twitter. This is perhaps because they compare it to Facebook and find it disappointingly inhuman, antisocial and ADHD. Move past the idea that Twitter is yet another place to keep up virtually with friends, however, and it’s not only an incredibly powerful disseminator of news and gossip, but an endlessly inventive rolling humour feed.
“To me it’s like working in an office with thousands of funny/clever people who only speak when they have something useful or funny or interesting to say,” says Graham Linehan, the writer of Father Ted and The IT Crowd.
To make the feed work, it’s important to choose your channels discerningly, as the funniest 3-D folk aren’t necessarily those putting in the most effort on Twitter. Personally, I’d give Russell Brand and Simon Pegg a miss in favour of the TV Burp writer Dan Maier or The Mighty Boosh’s Rich Fulcher. Once you’ve edited your list down, you’ll be witnessing a selection of comedy writers who have found an ideal platform to sound out and cut the flab from new work. The result can, at best, be a literary humour experience second only to reading Woody Allen’s Without Feathers for the first time.
“Brevity is the soul of wit,” Linehan says when asked to give six words on exactly why Twitter has proved such a successful forum for comic expression. Linehan tweets even more than Serafinowicz — he says he likes to have a “river of conversation going on nearby” when he writes, and tends “to submerge, rather than dip in” — but many of his messages actually involve spreading the word about the work of others, adding to the sense of Twitter as a support group for housebound comedy writers. One fellow scribe Linehan turned on to the site is the comic-book artist Michael Kupperman. “I’ve never really enjoyed any form of online interaction before, and frankly I assumed Twitter represented another great step downward in terms of people’s ability to communicate.
I was wrong,” Kupperman says. “There are so many funny, clever people, and their responses to me are so sly that it pushes me to try my best.” Evidence of this is Kupperman’s peerless, heavily retweeted “I think a great ending for this decade would be if the Twin Towers were in the shower, and it were all a dream.”
As a writer of humour books, I enjoy chiselling a tweet — finding the shortest way to get the most information across in the funniest way — and have often used Twitter as a sounding board for material. “Cat with messed up meow was meowing outside. Felt glad for not having cat with meow like that. Went out. Was my cat, meowing like that” took some time to edit down from a fairly lengthy anecdote, but ultimately the concise, Twitter version made it into the book.
Much of Fulcher’s recent humour book, Tiny Acts of Rebellion, has proved extremely tweet-friendly. “At first, I was afraid to write anything that wasn’t pithy, witty or well directed towards a funny clip. Then I became much more loose and expository,” he says. Looser still are the tweets of Matt Berry, Fulcher’s creative partner from the BBC3 sketch show Snuff Box, which might include “an uninteresting caption like ‘visiting my nan’, with a link to a disgusting or sinister picture”. Berry adds: “In a lot of ways, I’m using Twitter for misinformation or childish devilment, which is a far more interesting idea to me than just comparing responses to different jokes.”
“I can’t see why anyone would want to use it,” says the stand-up Stewart Lee, whose repetitive phrasing seems ostensibly ripe for Twitter. “It seems like voluntary electronic tagging. Also, I like to do clean and concise things — not keep on splurging. And I am not interested in giving anyone any idea about me personally, as I feel it would limit the amount of things I can talk about and how I can talk about them.” It’s easy to see Lee’s point: Adam Buxton aborted his Twitter life early on, for fear of using up witticisms he might want to employ in his 6Music show.
In his latest stand-up routine, however, Lee laments the illegal downloads that are costing him DVD sales. It’s hard not to believe that an army of loyal Twitter followers would help his cause. In the summer, when Serafinowicz sent out a rare non-humorous, non-greeting-based tweet to his minions about the DVD release of The Peter Serafinowicz Show being in jeopardy, the video took just a few hours to shoot to the top of the Amazon comedy chart on pre-orders. At the time of writing, it has 167 customer reviews — 110 more than Gavin & Stacey Series 1 — and an average rating of five stars. Impressive under any circumstances, but even more so when you consider that the people who have reviewed it are still a full month away from being able to own it.
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