‘Funny Tweets’ Review: Documentary on the Art of Being Funny on Twitter

For good or bad the internet is here to stay. One of the mainstays of the internet is Twitter, which allows people from all around the world to share ideas, and even better, jokes. Funny Tweets is a documentary that explores what it is like to be known on Twitter as someone who is funny. The film interviews some of the best known Twitter comedians like Conan O’Brien’s Andy Richter and Modern Family writer/producer Danny Zuker, who talk about their experiences writing jokes for their twitter accounts.

While you do get to see their tweets, especially some of their more famous ones, the film also explores the experience that those writers have with Twitter. Writing jokes for Twitter is an art form. The film shows us that these short jokes were first developed by comedians like Emo Phillips and Deep Thoughts creator Jack Handey, but even people like Winston Churchill wrote short jokes and comments long before the internet came about. I found it interesting that people like The Simpsons Matt Selman and Family Guy’s Alec Sulkin talk about how when they first started on Twitter, they treated it like it was a job. They figured out when the best time to tweet was and had a goal of writing a certain amount of jokes for each day. They also talk about how it used to be that you had to live in New York or Los Angeles to try and get a job as a writer of a TV show. Now through the power of Twitter, you can be living in a small town in Canada, working as a cashier at a pharmacy and get a job writing jokes for a living, as one young man did in the film.

The film also explores that when you try to be funny on Twitter, you will offend someone or maybe a whole bunch of people. Several of the comedy writers talk about tweets that they thought were funny and were terrible ideas. A couple of people interviewed for the film mention the time that Gilbert Gottfried lost his job voicing the AFLAC duck because of a tasteless tweet that he did after a disaster in Japan. The film also explores the dark side of Twitter, where just about anyone can attack someone else, often for no reason. Some, like social influencer Elijah Daniel, who is gay, is continuously attacked on a daily basis. It’s especially hard for women who try to be funny on Twitter like Amber Tozer, who are attacked for just having the gall to tweet funny stuff. Both Amber and Dani Fernandez talk about how they fight back against these attacks, sometimes tracking down the attackers Facebook accounts to find where they work and then sending screenshots of the attacks to their employers.

For many of these writers, they have gotten book and TV deals just for being funny on Twitter. Most of the people interviewed for the film feel that Twitter is a positive experience and they do it because they enjoy the interaction. What is also is interesting is how through Twitter they have made lasting friendships, one writer even credits the fact that he met and then dated comedian Sarah Silverman through Twitter. And several of the writers have used Twitter for storylines for their shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy.

Funny Tweets is a small, funny documentary where you get to put faces to some of the most famous funny people on Twitter. The film quite effectively pops up tweets on the screen throughout the film to give us examples of what the people that are interviewed write about. I will warn you that some of the tweets have pretty bad language and some of them are quite raunchy but also hilarious. If you want to laugh out loud and maybe, find some funny people to follow on twitter, then this film is for you.  

Funny Tweets Review

My Rating: Full Price

Mike’s Rating System from Best to Worst:
1). I Would Pay to See it Again
2). Full Price
3). Bargain Matinee
4). Cable
5). You Would Have to Pay Me to See it Again