* Illustration: Leo Espinosa * Imagine a comedian walking down the street, didja-ever-noticing things: "Airplane peanuts come in really tiny bags!" "Telemarketers wouldn't want you to call them at home!" As these nuggets come to him, he jots them down in a notebook—the notebook all comedians are supposed to carry around in case they think of something funny. Then the unthinkable happens: He loses the notebook, dropping it down a storm drain while deep in reverie about hot dog buns. ("Why do they come in packs of eight when hot dogs come in packs of—Aaaaaugh! Oh God! My notebook!") It's a tragedy. All that great material, gone. A fellow comedian comes along and finds her colleague weeping. "What do I do now?" he asks. And the friend says, "Write more." (Then she pulls out her handset and discreetly Tweets: "Hey, hive mind, is there a manhole near 50th and 8th? #sewer joke-diving.")
Something like this really happened to a writer friend of Paul Feig, creator of Freaks & Geeks and co-executive producer of The Office. Feig tells the story like the parable it is. The moral? Chuck the notebook and open a Twitter account. "If you're a creative person, you can regenerate. It shouldn't be an issue of 'Now my best stuff is gone!' If you've got only a limited number of things that are funny, don't say you're a comedy writer." Social media, with their hummingbird metabolisms, "keep you from being too precious about things."
Preciousness and perfectionism are the enemies of laughter, Feig says. I'd go further: They can be inimical to creativity itself. And the positive implications of disposable ideation (not too catchy or meme-orable, but who cares? I'll coin a better term later) go way beyond the chuckle hut. Picture a continuous curve of non-perfected, non-permanent expression, as opposed to individual, agonized boluses of brilliance. "Fuck it. I wrote it; if people don't like it, I'll put another out there soon enough," Feig says of his Tweet ethic. "It's freeing."
Unfettered creative freedom is dear to Feig, who labored for years to perfect a near-perfect television show only to see it strangled to death by network exigencies. Well into his career as a comic actor-writer-director, he was still searching for a congenial medium. He performed live well into the '90s, but it was never his bliss—he just didn't have a better way to showcase his jokes. "Now I have 200,000 followers. In all my years of stand-up, I guarantee if you added up all my audiences it wouldn't be 200,000 people." Now, he's one of Twitter's most prolific amusematrons, secreting a steady drip of giggles. ("What's your definition of denial? Mine is when they stamp pictures of roses on toilet paper.")
Feig is hardly alone: Aziz Ansari, Eugene Mirman, Paul F. Tompkins, Sarah Silverman, and the Robs Huebel, Riggle, and Corddry are all a-Twitter, all the time. ("If you're a comedian, you cannot be a Luddite anymore," Feig says. "You're shooting yourself in the foot.") Yet, taken as a whole, this din of japery doesn't feel like a desperate mosh at the Robin Williams mansion. It reads more like a collective sketchbook, where comedians relax their legendary self-consciousness, territoriality, and joke-hoarding, and ideas evolve out of idleness, casually, almost by mistake. Call it pointillist jesting, call it ephemeral funning, call it—well, anything other than those names (let me keep riffing; I'll hit on a good one)—but recognize that comedy is always the canary in the cultural mine shaft, a trailer for philosophical and epistemological trends to come.
So what's true of comedy now may soon be true of theoretical physics or urban planning or maybe even column writing. "The perfect," Voltaire warned us, "is the enemy of the good." "Try again. Fail again. Fail better," Samuel Beckett wrote. "Write your way out of a thinking block—because you'll never think your way out of a writing block," Twitters the net humorist known as Hotdogsladies, adding: "Ultra Soft, Ultra Strong, or saturated in lotion? Buying Charmin requires harrowing decisions about the perceived needs of your ass." That's funny! And if the next one isn't, who cares? That's what's so liberating about the new nano-clowning. (Nailed it!)
Email scott_brown@wired.com.
Play Previous: Swank Up Your Facebook Page With a Hand-Painted Portrait Ask a Basterd: Can I Post My Wife's Butt on Twitter Without Asking?
