Weird Twitter is a loose genre of Internet humour dedicated to publication of humorous material on the social network Twitter that is disorganised and hard to explain.
Related to anti-humour and created primarily by Twitter users who are not professional humourists, Weird Twitter-style jokes may be presented as disorganised thoughts, rather than in a conventional joke format or punctuated sentence structure. The genre is based around the restriction of Twitter's 140-character message length, requiring jokes to be quite short. The genre may also include repurposing of overlooked material on the internet, such as parodying posts made by spambots or deliberately amateurish images created in Paint. The New York Times has described the genre as "inane" and intended "to subtly mock the site’s corporate and mainstream users." Some sections of Weird Twitter may be dedicated to a certain subculture or worldview, such as Traditionalist Catholicism. A notable writer on Weird Twitter is dril.
References
- Herrman, John; Notopoulos, Katie. "Weird Twitter: The Oral History". Buzzfeed. Retrieved 24 March 2016.
- Raymer, Miles. "Weird Twitter Leaves Irony Behind on Instagram". Motherboard. Vice. Retrieved 8 May 2016.
- Dewey, Caitlin. "Who is @Darth and why is this person always in my Twitter feed?". Washington Post. Retrieved 8 May 2016.
- Douglas, Nick. ""Weird Twitter" explained". Daily Dot. Retrieved 24 March 2016.
- Knoblauch, Max. "The 21 Weirdest Twitter Accounts". Mashable. Retrieved 25 March 2016.
- Losse, Kate. "Weird Corporate Twitter". The New Inquiry. Retrieved 24 March 2016.
- Flynn, John. "The Normal Dudes Of 'Weird Twitter'". Metro Silicon Valley. Retrieved 24 March 2016.
- Gallagher, Brenden. "A Survey of The Best and Weirdest of Weird Twitter". Complex. Retrieved 24 March 2016.
- Sun, Scott. "An Odd, Uplifting 'Alien': Meet The Man Behind A 'Weird Twitter' Star". All Tech Considered. NPR. Retrieved 25 March 2016.
- Usher, Tom. "What It's Really Like to Be a Popular 'Weird Twitter' Personality". Vice. Retrieved 25 March 2016.
- Bromwich, Jonah. "Crowd-Funding Gets Wacky". New York Times. Retrieved 8 May 2016.
- Bridle, James. "Meet the 'alt lit' writers giving literature a boost". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 May 2016.
- Meisenzahl, Mary (10 March 2019). "Inside the World of Weird Catholic Twitter — and the "Rad Trads" Keeping The Old Traditions Alive". MEL Magazine. Retrieved 11 March 2022.