UPDATE: Twitter becomes its truest self with prolonged “Diplo”-Denny’s insult fight
Someday, when we’re all wandering the wasteland of what’s left of America, dodging murderous Facebook chatbots and desperately rotating our fidget spinners for warmth, we’ll need a new poetic language to describe how we got to this sorry state. We here at The A.V. Club would now like to make our own contribution to that future-oral tradition, with the following bit of social media doggerel:
Diplo and Denny’s
Twitter-born frenemies
War with potato
Why u mad, Diplo?
Which is to say, Twitter reached its logical apex today, when celebrity DJ and James Van Der Beek inspiration Diplo got into a fight with the social media account for Denny’s, the popular brand of drunk teenager storage centers/pancake emporiums. The feud—which appears to be operating at levels of irony so granular that several top meme scientists have been lost in the effort to explore them—sprang up when Denny’s tweeted a picture of a potato, and Diplo’s record label accused the restaurant of ripping them off.
(Hey, are we drunk? We feel drunk right now.)
The Denny’s social media team—whose smart-assed, meme-copying antics we’ve reported on before—clearly smelled this delicious troll bait from a mile away, because they responded with not just a fake apology, but also a misspelling of Diplo’s name, considered a Class-3 escalation in brand-to-brand warfare.
And while that’s actually kind of funny (at least, as far as we can tell, because our vision’s really starting to blur over here), Diplo then started engaging with actual Denny’s’ fans in a war of wit, words, and wasted afternoons:
The feud appears to have quieted down, but it leaves us with a number of questions. Like: Was this some sort of viral marketing for What Would Diplo Do? If Diplo and Denny’s destroy each other in a forest, does it score a like? What’s this red stuff coming out of our eyes? Is it strawberry jelly? We’re feeling very very tight. LMAO.
UPDATE: It’s come to our attention that the Diplo in these tweets—the verified account @_diplo_—is not the real Diplo, but presumably a separate account connected to the What Would Diplo Do? show. We apologize for the mistake, and for briefly obscuring the strangeness of a man pretending to be a famous DJ pretending to have a fight with Denny’s. Meanwhile, we also have to live with the fact that we were publicly tricked by James Van Der Beek, a feeling that, as you can imagine, is less than ideal. (If only there were some sort of popular online image to express our despair, but, alas, we’re at a loss for GIFs.)