Legendary Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder is using Twitter in the best/worst way
Though all of the social media platforms are pretty similar, each one has its own unique purpose. Facebook is for ignoring your family members or high school friends when they share political opinions or tired memes, Instagram is for showing how great you are and how great your life is, and Twitter is about shameless self-promotion—whether you’re promoting your work, your bad attempts at jokes, or your “personal brand.” The expert Twitter users disguise this as its own kind of content, making the self-promotion just as entertaining as the thing they want you to pay attention to, so you end up buying tickets to their movie or checking out their blog without even realizing that you’re still laughing at some great zinger or weeping over a particularly feels-worthy confession.
Legendary Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder—a guy who probably had a hand in creating a lot of your favorite stuff from the show—is officially on Twitter now, and despite his impressive body of work, he is not one of these expert Twitter users. He’s just a guy promoting his books:
Granted, those lines are pretty great, but it’s not quite as fun as getting 140 characters of new Swartzwelder humor would be. Then again, maybe this is just the ultimate form of Swartzwelder humor. Maybe he’s not an expert Twitter user, he’s the expert Twitter user. Think about it: These quotes are all solid examples of his dry sense of humor, and what’s dryer than subverting people’s expectations by refusing to give them actual funny tweets when you’ve got a bunch of detective novels you can just pull quotes from?
Those lines are brilliant. This is like the comedy writer equivalent of Kim Kardashian posting nothing but tweets that say “buy the thing I’m holding in this picture.” He’s not just tweeting, he’s doing performance art.