dril responds to bizarre Kamala Harris email: "They must hate me or otherwise wish me dead"

A couple of weeks back, we reported on one of those occasional moments that makes reality feel all wobbly beneath our feet: The Kamala Harris/Tim Walz presidential campaign including an actual tweet from internet comedian dril in one of their campaign emails, a moment that marked either the ultimate triumph of Weird Twitter, or heralded its final, permanently co-opted demise.

At the time, dril himself fired back at the inclusion of his work in the campaign’s materials, blasting Harris for her ongoing support of Israel’s ongoing military actions in Gaza. Now, though, he’s given a fuller interview on the moment to Rolling Stone, and since the world can probably never have too many “in-character” dril interviews, it felt worth diving into the series of emailed exchanges. Including the online writer’s insistence that Harris and Walz should pay him “the full value” of his classic “im not mad” tweet, “which I estimate would be about $25.00.” (Also: “I know they aren’t hurting for money right now, they must have raised like half a billion dollars up to this point. So, they must hate me, or otherwise wish me dead.”)

dril being dril, he then immediately pivots: “If anything, I should be paying the new media toilet robber who pilfered my waste product for the free exposure that this incident has provided me. My posts strictly belong in the dumpster. They must never be allowed in any emails, especially not any emails associated with the Resolute Desk. They are Beneath the office.” The comedian’s disinterest in charting out any territory except that which he personally finds funny is partly why it was so weird that some staffer in the Harris campaign thought they could get some heat by using him as a meme: Although he’s done plenty of political material, the “dril sensibility,” for lack of a better word, is chaotic, absurdist, and loosely pessimistic above all else, in ways that sit ill at ease with traditional campaigning.

As to whether he thought the tweet-pick in question, applying the “please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad” mindset to Donald Trump, was apt, dril had some further thoughts:

Well, it’s not the tweet I personally would have picked to send to millions of people to prove some sort of point about human emotion. When I wrote that tweet, I think I had more petty issues in mind. I did not consider that it would be used by a presidential candidate to ‘madshame’ their opponent. And that’s fucked, because I think it’s fine to be mad in certain cases, particularly during an election that everyone says could decide if one billion toddlers get bombed or not. If I genuinely believed that, I suppose I would also get mad, and that’s fine.

As to what this means for his lasting impact (and the basic inability to translate being the funniest person on the internet into other kinds of success), dril was typically humble:

I think it’s the greatest honor to have your art screenshotted and commodified by the most annoying people online and deployed like chess pieces in obnoxious, inconsequential arguments, alongside such elevated content as animated gifs from NBC’s The Office and the funny cartoon frog that supposedly represents disenfranchised young white men. I’m truly happy just to be part of the conversation.

You can read the full interview here.