@OfficialJLD: Hanging with the loveliest ladies in the land.
dying
An Open Letter To Comedian @ColinKane.
Hi Colin,
I’ve recently discovered you on Twitter through friends, and after reading some of your tweets I’d like to ask you some questions. As there may be some people reading this who are unfamiliar with Colin’s style of comedy, here are some of his recent jokes:
If that’s not enough for you, here’s a link to his Twitter page - https://twitter.com/#!/colinkane.Okay, question time:
What are you doing? Seriously Colin, do you ever think about what you’re doing? Your timeline reads like an all-out assault on women. You also make jokes at the expense of overweight people, blacks, pretty much everyone except white males (your target demographic?), but women are definitely getting most of your vitriol. I don’t really understand why.
I read three of your jokes to my girlfriend. She’s certainly no prude and she has a great sense of humour. She follows some of the best comedians on Twitter and is quite hard to offend. Her response? “Those make me feel bad about myself.” Yikes. Is this the intended reaction? Why do you hate so much of the world’s population that you devote a large amount of your time to trying to bring them down? What happened to you to make you like this?
Your timeline is packed with jokes where you degrade people who don’t actually deserve it. But you never make light of yourself. You seem to be the one person that you’ve deemed as being “off-limits”. Have you ever thought about aiming at people who actually deserve to be taken down a peg or two, instead of stepping on the downtrodden? Ever taken a swing at a bully?
Do you see this style of comedy scaling up? Could you use this type of material in a best-selling book or screenplay? Can you sip coffee and talk about using women as something to ejaculate into and then dispose of on a prime-time talk show? Can you get a sitcom deal from this material (“Shit Racist Misogynists Say”)? I think you’ve really put a cap on yourself with this stuff. You’re small-time at the moment, and think you’ll only ever be small-time if this is your best/only strategy. One in four women have experienced sexual assault. Factor in how many people know and care about these people. Even if you don’t care about these people, maybe you should think about how your jokes will affect your chances of making it big when this many people will hate them. You’re swimming upstream with your current mindset, and you don’t come across as a particularly strong swimmer. Your frat boy fan-base will eventually grow up and leave you behind.
Could you ever post as much as you do now in one week, but without degrading anyone or trying to boost your own ego? That would be a true test of your wit. You already have some rare jokes that aren’t aimed at anyone, so let’s take a look:
Okay… I think I see the problem; these aren’t very funny either (you were right in that last one though, you wrote “LOL” and there was nothing to laugh about). So it’s clear you rely on degrading others for your comedy.
These were especially enlightening:
Is this one about you? Did the mask slip just long enough for us to see your true face?Have you ever managed to make a woman feel beautiful Colin? Have you ever managed to make a woman feel loved? Because anyone can do that last thing. That’s amateur hour.
Again, is this about you Colin?
Is this what you’re like in real life? If it is then that’s really sad. If you’re not like this, how do you reconcile being a normal, caring person who acts like an uncaring douche bag on the internet? I have to point out that your photos posted to Twitter seem to be just you, all alone. Is this your life Colin? Are you a guy who takes admiring photos of himself in public bathroom mirrors because nobody else wants to be near you? Your Facebook profile picture shows you smiling against a backdrop of angry people who hate you, but in reality you run from these people by trying to block and silence anyone who doesn’t have glowing praise for you. This picture is supposed to say “I love to be hated!”, but everything else about you screams “I desperately need love and attention.”
Do you have any real female friends? A mother? Sisters? Daughters? Do you want people to treat them in the manner that you endorse? “But it’s a joke!” some will say, “It’s not real!” I follow a ton of comedians, and some of them say some pretty fucked-up things, but nothing as cruel and unfunny as your jokes. There’s a little wink that these people slip in between the lines that lets the reader know that they don’t really mean it. That wink is missing from your tweets.
When you read your replies, do you ever notice that at least half of them are extremely negative towards your jokes? Everyone gets the odd insult or criticism because of their comedy, you’d be doing something wrong if you didn’t. I’ve been telling jokes on Twitter to more people than you do for four years now, and not once have I ever had a backlash like I see you getting constantly.
Your Twitter strategy puzzles me. You seem to save a whole bunch of these comedy nuggets up and then post them all in one big chunk, and then ask for retweets. If your comedy really is as popular as you claim it is on your website, you wouldn’t have to frantically block people who leave negative comments for you (often in less than a minute), or beg people to retweet you, or retweet compliments that justify your views, or give away free tickets to your shows to fill empty seats.
With the jokes you do now, you’re basically working as support crew for misogynists and sex offenders everywhere. You are the wind beneath their dirty little wings. They read your tweets and it makes them think that the way they think and act is not only acceptable, but that it’s funny and popular opinion.
I have a sneaking suspicion that you’ll never respond to any of this. Most likely you’ll just block me on Twitter (pointless, I don’t follow you) like you do with others that negatively respond to your insults. That’s a shame, because if you really are a man who relies on his wit to make a living, then that would be no problem replying with something intelligent. If you’re a professional comedian, I’m sure you’ve spend hundreds of hours thinking about your comedy, so you’ll be able to easily defend it.
I think people should be able to tweet whatever they want, but I also think people also have a responsibility to think about what they’re putting out into the world. Do you ever stop to think that maybe you’re doing something truly awful?
Sincerely,
Mark (not your biggest fan).
P.S. Please don’t think that you’ll win any new fans from me posting this, not one of my followers follows you and I doubt they ever would.
YES! @colinkane is fucking awful
still one of my favourite tweets i’ve ever done
Lady Comics: Who Needs Late Night? We’ve Got Tumblr
If you ask a female comedian how social media has impacted her professional life, she will likely respond like Elaine Carroll. “Social media has made my career,” says Carroll, the 30-year-old creator of the Very Mary Kate web series, a spoof of Mary Kate Olsen’s glam life in New York.
Remember just a few years back, when comedians (of any gender) relentlessly chased guest spots at the feet of David Letterman and Jay Leno? Getting a gig on late night was the ultimate career boost, but women comedians had to fight through the prejudices both professional (like infamously misogynist Letterman booker Eddie Brill) and cultural (let’s all try to forget that Christopher Hitchens essay).
But the level playing field of Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr means no one gets between ambitious talent and a potentially receptive audience. All it takes is perseverance, ability, skill, and infinite patience.
“Social media has essentially become my career,” says Kate Spencer, an improv instructor and writer at VH1 who blogs on Tumblr.
4 months gone and i’m only getting better!!!
favstar makes twitter so fucking exhausting sometimes
the cliquiness and the sense of entitlement it gives people. think i might take a break from twitter for a few days - i’ve already not been using it as much. just tired of feeling like i have to a) suck up to get anywhere b) follow-back EVERYONE c) fight against these groups of people (and there’s an obvious trend in people who have unfollowed me recently, even after following me for several months, who all seem closely related to one popular but shitty account that followed me and i never followed back) who spend all their time on twitter jerking each other off.
i guess i should be proud i have 850 followers mostly off the back of my own work. i’ve gotten #FFs here and there but pretty rarely, so. i dunno. it’s all really fucking stupid when i think about it.
Last night Megan “Sloppy Tweets” Amram (@meganamram) tweeted another of her pithy masterpieces, “Carpe DM” (soon deleted after MAJOR backlash).
As with a lot of her tweets, this one had been done before. But this time Megan herself starred it two weeks earlier. You would think would remember starring a tweet since SHE PRACTICALLY NEVER STARS.
She might be a lovely person, but she is consistenly insulting to her twitter followers by her sloppy tweeting and lack of social interaction. It is clear she gained her magnitiude of followers with others’ help. There are far funnier people with a fraction of her follower count.
Just for fun, here is how to attain her follower count:
- From relative obscurity, say one or two funny things to influence someone on twitter with 80K followers. Don’t be too funny (or male) as you don’t want to threaten this person in any way
- Watch them RT you and FF you several times a week for no good reason, others will follow suit for no apparent reason
- Tweet common sayings, change a word
- Tweet something funny once in a while
- Don’t star anyone except a small group of friends
- Don’t follow anyone
Viola! 68K followers that star and RT everything you do.
Megan, please step it up. We know you can do better. Also, no one would care but because of your high follower count you are shoved in everyone’s face on favstar, newspaper articles, etc. Best to you.
-H
I don’t understand this. “…consistenly insulting to her twitter followers by her sloppy tweeting and lack of social interaction”? Who cares? It’s her account, they’re her followers. “It is clear she gained her magnitiude of followers with others’ help. There are far funnier people with a fraction of her follower count.” Um, duh? Everyone with any significant number of followers gains them because people help them. Are #FFs and RTs not allowed anymore? As for the second sentence there, according to whom? Where can I find out who is objectively funny on Twitter? Is there a list of some kind?
I appreciate what you guys are doing with this blog - it’s entertaining and enjoyable to read - but can you not make posts like this which are tantamount to the kind of petty vendettas @ThiefPolice has been embarking on lately? Yes, she tweeted something that’s been tweeted before. OH NO. HOW DARE SHE. I’ve probably done that, you’ve probably done that, we’ve all seen it happen before. It was deleted. It was clearly an accident. It’s an easy joke to make.
Similarly, she can follow and star whomever she wants. There’s nothing more nauseating than this kind of ‘Twitter absolutism’, as though you can only use Twitter one way. People can follow who they like, star the tweets they like, whatever. It’s also particularly odd to see this post written given your blog’s defense of, say @_TomBrady (whose tweets I also follow and thoroughly enjoy) for doing the exact same thing. Would you have attacked him for the same thing if he had ten times his follower count?
Just. Ugh. I like gossip but please don’t become another bitter, whiny “people with lots of followers are automatically elitists!!!” blog like thechucklehutt. It’s just sad to watch, and you come off sounding nothing but jealous and unpleasant.
people on twitter confuse me
if you’re following me and favourite my tweets, I can see and quantify them. People who use Favstar should know this. And yet someone who faved me 35 times in my faved by list unfollows me? I’m getting mixed messages here!!
These are the things about Twitter that confuse me. Why would you unfollow someone whose tweets you seem to enjoy? Or do you just favourite any old shit because you can?
This actually happens to me more than seems reasonable, but usually it’s people who I don’t follow back - I don’t believe in doing that unless I actually want to follow the person - who do it. Favourite my tweets regularly then, “Oh, unfollow.” what? Are your standards not being met? What the fuck?
The reason this particular unfollow confuses me is that they’ve followed me for some time. They’re not just some random person, they’re another good tweeter. One of their top tweets actually states how annoying they find it when people expect follow-backs and other things in return for stars. It strikes me as a bit hypocritical, and I was already following the person. It wouldn’t annoy me unless I know they would be annoyed by the same. Ugh people!!?!?
