There is something about unfettered access to social media that makes celebrities behave in oh so stupid ways. For some reason, they think we care what they have to say. And what they have to say usually has little value, other than providing us with some much needed head scratching material. In fact, Twitter has become little more than a tool for celebrities to display their severe mental impairments.
Politicians use Twitter to whittle away support and votes. Actors use Twitter to crash box office numbers. Pop artists use Twitter to confirm their irrelevance. Reality stars use Twitter to punish us further with their inane and vaguely coherent rants.
There are very few celebrities who can use Twitter as an instrument of inspiration and worthwhile entertainment. Most of them are comedians and sadly, most of them are dead. What I would not give to read a Sam Kinison tweet. I imagine it would be riddled with gold-medal-caliber rage and satire. It would be filled with the kind of useful grit that we all need to be exposed to today.
Andy Kaufman would no doubt provide us with tweets that would give us a perfect mix of confusion, enlightenment, and laughter. Office workers everywhere would gather around their cubicles and dissect every one of the 140 characters like Ivy Leaguers dissect the words of Yeats and Whitman.
Mitch Hedberg is another one who would provide us with welcome tweets. I can just picture the sublime awkwardness of his short messages, the innocuous observations of everyday weirdness condensed into brilliant musings that would become viral before we even had a chance to break out into riotous laughter.
Would their tweets be offensive? Yes, particularly Kinison’s and Kaufman’s. That’s what they did so well. But, they offended us in a way that entertained and informed us. They offended us to make us better as a society and because they could be funny as shit while they did it.
There’s no doubt about it. Twitter needs dead comedians.
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