Bloggasm

If brevity is the soul of wit, then it isn’t inconceivable that a major book publisher would seek to package witticisms in 140-character morsels. Nick Douglas, a former Gawker writer, formulated the idea of collecting funny tweets back in 2007, when the micro-blogging service was a mere twinkle in the eyes of venture capitalists. As one of its early adopters, Douglas observed the rise of a new form of literary humor that relied on a turn of phrase, a twist delivered deftly at the tail end of a tiny sentence that in just a few words quickly built a mode of tension to be subsequently released with a simple syllable. Perhaps before he even realized that he one day wanted to collect these tweets into a book, he began favoriting them, creating his own tiny feed of one-liners and quotable quotes.

A year later he was approached by a literary agent who had read Douglas’ tweets and his writing elsewhere. The agent asked if the writer had any book ideas in mind, a question that eventually led to communication with an editor at HarperCollins. By early this year it had been announced that Douglas, who had been paid a reported five figures, would be editing a book for the publisher, titled Twitter Wit, due out this fall.

Though Douglas is one of a few hundred Twitter users that tweet out consistent bursts of humor, he asserted to me that tweets, unlike other literary forms, are well-suited for brilliant blips of hilarity from casual everyday users. “It’s possibly like poetry,” he told me. “Except it’s a lot easier to write a clever one liner than it is to write a poem that’s good. It’s easy to write bad poetry, or rather you’re more likely to write bad poetry, but I actually think the vast majority of people could write a very funny line.”

To try to cast his net as wide as possible, Douglas set up a submissions page at Twitterwit.net where users could send in their funny tweets. By this point he had already favorited hundreds of them himself, and a programmer friend of his wrote a script that exported all these into a spreadsheet, which he then combed through. The plan, he explained, is to cull together a few hundred, which would then be laid out about five tweets to a page, with an entire page devoted to tweets from well-known celebrities.

“Over the last couple months there has been a push to get a lot of celebrities into the book, and a lot of commedians and writers, and that’s been fantastic,” Douglas said. “My editor was pushing and reminding me that it’s ok to contact these well known people and I was very scared of that. And now we’ve got Jimmy Fallon, Neil Gaiman, and Ashton Kutcher and Paula Poundstone. We’ve got Susan Orlean from the New Yorker. In fact a lot of New Yorker writers have made it in.”

But what is the formula for a funny tweet? How does one set up and execute a package of wit with so little space to work with? Douglas said he has seen a few trends that have cropped up as he’s mined the twittersphere for hidden gems. Many of the funniest ones involve the user making an insightful, quirky observation about daily life, depicting the absurdity of actions we often take for granted. But he particularly enjoys the tiny fictions, the micro-stories that lay out an entire plot in a few words. Take, for instance, the tweet issued from the Twitter user fireland: “Oh my gosh I didn’t mean to knock you off your tricycle! Here, let me hold your ice cream sandwich while you LATER ASSHOLE”

“The amount that the brain has to fill in the spaces that this is a monologue and the person is stealing a tricycle from a little kid is so brilliant as far as I’m concerned,” Douglas said. “There’s another user who says, ‘Why do they design martini glasses so they’re easy to spill on the bus?’ It takes the last word to twist the joke. I forget who it is that once said that if you diagram a joke it basically looks like a cliff. Everything is going in one direction and then it turns. If you can carry out the tension of the joke until the last word, so that only one syllable switches the whole train of thought, and it makes you have to go back and look at the whole sentence again, that’s one aspect that makes for an amazing tweet.”

The editor said this isn’t necessarily a new form of humor; he provided examples like Groucho Marx, Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde, all of whom had quick one liners that went on to become more famous than the people who thought of them. But nonetheless he said Twitter is one of the first tools to force us to turn this device into its own literary form.

Though the first book hasn’t even been published yet, Douglas is already hoping there will be a second volume. Most of the first book will include the tweets he had favorited over the years, while for later versions he hopes to include a more diverse variety of contributors. As for payment for those who are included in this volume, each will get a contributor’s copy of the finished product. So while the book may be a sign that Twitter has become a mainstream literary form, its best practitioners won’t be able to quit their day jobs anytime soon.