Over ten years ago, Twitter used to be, amongst several other things, one place that comedians could build their own audience off the merits of their clever or unfiltered Twitter feeds. Rob Delaney and Megan Amram’s tweets ruled supreme and, from their massive followings on the microblogging platform, they launched their comedy careers. Additionally, supplementary platforms such as Witstream highlighted certain comedians and comedy writers and was a great way to see the best of the best live tweet anything from presidential debates to the Oscars.
Those days are long gone.
They’re so long gone that it feels like an eon ago from where Twitter is now with unhinged tech billionaire Elon Musk taking over after trying to get out of his initial deal to buy Twitter. The aggregate user base for Twitter seemingly keeps shrinking by the minute, trying to fire half the Twitter workforce has gone poorly, and the announcement for being verified for a $8/month Twitter subscription has spurned anger from nearly everyone on Twitter. Add in a spike in hate speech on the platform and you have several cans of fuel to add to the fire that is burning down what used to be the premier social media app.
As mentioned above, comedy’s relationship with Twitter used to be sacrosanct, but with the rise of Instagram and Tik Tok (and their unfortunate misfire with their livestream feature, Periscope), the platform had already fallen out of favor with comedians well before Musk’s chaotic takeover was conceived. When it comes to social media, many comics, these days, focus on captioning their stand-up on Tik Tok and Instagram Reels or trying to build a following with a uniquely focused podcast. Former Twitter stars Rob Delaney and Megan Amram have gone on to having very successful and decorated careers in writing and acting in television with Twitter being much less representative of their work.
This comedy/Twitter relationship has soured over the last 48 hours even more as Musk has stated that all impersonators will be permanently banned from Twitter if it isn’t clear parody. Changing your name on Twitter in order to satirize a brand or figure just happens to be a favorite pastime of comedians and many comedy folks are giving their farewell to Twitter by changing their profile name to none other than Elon Musk. It seems to be the last good thing to do on Twitter at this point? Kathy Griffin is the most high profile ban thus far, though comedian Griffin Newman has also seemed to be kicked off despite specifying parody when tweeting “as Musk”.
At the time of this post, there doesn’t seem to be any sort moves being made by Musk to curry favor with many of the types of people that helped build Twitter into what it once was. In fact, it would almost seem as though Elon is trying to implode Twitter after being forced to go through with a deal he wanted to back out on for all the havoc that has transpired in just the last week.
Social media already feels like a necessary evil for any sort of creative type, but especially so for comedians. With the chaos run rampant with Musk’s takeover any and all tweeting, Twitter seems destined to become a digital wasteland now. The presence of so many more social platforms that are better liked by comedic performers and audiences alike will only accelerate that demise, as far as we can see.
What we’re wondering now is how comics will try out jokes that would have tried on Twitter elsewhere? Posting text on IG Stories, actually reading jokes from a notebook on TikTok, trying that other other OTHER social media platform that vaguely resembles Twitter called Mastodon? From the look of things, we all won’t have to wait long to find out.