Why do so many Twitterers seem to be aspiring stand-up comics?
“Good news: Cure for diabetes in mice,” Josh Donoghue, known as awryone, tweets from somewhere in Connecticut. “Bad news: in order for the cure to work on people, they must release whole mice into the bloodstream.”
“I fell victim to a Fonzie scheme,” jokes Richard Smallbone, a Canadian who logs in as rsmallbone. “My financial adviser kept flashing me the thumbs up and saying ‘Aaaaay!’”
Humor writer Nick Douglas has a theory: Twitter’s 140-character limit on messages, plus the seemingly fleeting nature of those messages on a user’s Twitter page, encourage people to toss out one-liners without worrying they’ll be haunted by their own bad jokes.
Douglas, a former writer for the cruelly funny Gawker blog, is compiling a book, Twitter Wit, culled entirely from Twitter status updates.
Photo by tashmahal.
