I’m a fan of anecdotal standup, but the art of the one-liner is something every comic aspires to, and Twitter has inspired a resurgence of this sort of comedic haiku. Paring us down to 140 characters, we’ve got to fit all the funny into very little space. It’s all punch line with hardly any setup. So to pull this off with finesse takes a decent amount of skill in the wordplay department. Inspired from her recent Twitter obsession and attempts to refine the art of “the perfect tweet,” Merrill decided to create this show.
“Twitter made me want to be a better writer … I became obsessed with everyone’s tweets, and loved how funny they were. I wanted to do something very different with this show,” she added. “It’s great to hear tweets aloud and figure out how funny they actually are.”
It was exciting to feel involved in a comedic social networking experiment: while the comics were allowed to do their sets if they desired, most opted to read from their feeds, whether on iPhone, Moleskine journal or a crumpled receipt. Some jokes landed, and some didn’t, but we were all in the journey together, and sometimes watching a comic experiment and learning is more fulfilling than watching a flawless, perfectly-timed set where every joke lands like clockwork.
The jokes that were most successful were either classic one-liners or those that played off of the Twitter vocabulary. For example, good puns and witty observations were #winning (i.e. follow @aparnapkin for such gems as, “If reverse racism is wrong, I don’t want to be white,” ha!), while sometimes an odd sentence would be transformed into something guffaw-worthy through a silly hashtag addition (I personally loved @BabsGray for “I brought some grapes into the bath with me but they didn’t turn into raisins. #whatgives”).
On the whole, it was a whole lot of fun, though I’m sure I’ll soon regret that it motivated me to install the Twitter App on my Android.
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Oh and thank you #comediva!!!
This is #awesome! THANK YOU, Nikki, for the great write up!
I had to cover another event for Comediva this time, but I definitely want to be at the next one! I love tweets of all kinds. Especially the funny kinds.
Sounds like a great show! I love Twitter one-liners as well and am looking forward to hitting the next show. 😉