Earlier this month, after maintaining anonymity for three years, Josh Friedland, a freelance writer, announced that he was behind @RuthBourdain, a Twitter account that combined the food writer Ruth Reichl’s often rapturous accounts of food with the sarcasm and vulgarity of Anthony Bourdain. The account was an occasionally funny and often profane deflation of America’s current overblown food culture (“Jesus. This fucking cold, gray city. Snorting salmon roe off tiny pancakes. Golden showers of lemon. Money shot of sour cream. New York.”), and the author accumulated seventy-one thousand followers. Since revealing himself, Friedland has posted only four tweets to @RuthBourdain, all in reference to the revelation of his identity. The account is, for all intents and purposes, salted earth: rare is the parody Twitter account that remains funny after the author unmasks himself.
Parody accounts are, oddly, one of Twitter’s most distinguishing features. Anyone can have virtually any username on the service, as opposed to Facebook and Google Plus, which require users to display their real names. While fake Twitter accounts are sometimes created in an attempt to deceive, they’re just as often meant to be humorous, and have become a routine reaction to practically every news event, a fact lamented by Alex Pareene in The New Republic. Most fake Twitter accounts are, in fact, unfunny; some are in poor taste, like the fake Tsarnaev brother accounts that emerged almost immediately after the two were identified as suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. But at their best, they ascend to “the highest cultural rung” of “the making-fun-of-others department,” as Louis Menand wrote of parody in the magazine in 2010. “Part of the enjoyment people take in parody is the enjoyment of feeling intelligent,” Menand noted. “Not everyone gets the joke.” The highly self-selected audience necessary for parody presents itself automatically on Twitter, which allows its users to choose exactly whom to follow.
@BPGlobalPR, created in May, 2010, by the comedian Josh Simpson, was perhaps the first Twitter parody to receive truly mainstream attention; the account was a brutal skewering of BP’s milquetoast response to the Gulf oil spill as well as of Twitter’s deployment in modern corporate communications. The resulting effect is surreal on its own; this, in turn, makes Twitter an exceptional vehicle for parody. “A parody is an imitation of an imitation: its target is the manner of representation itself,” Menand wrote. “If the original is solemn, then solemnity must be what is solemnly lampooned.” @BPGlobalPR began with a tweet declaring “We regretfully admit that something has happened off of the Gulf Coast. More to come”—a straightforward post—before it transitioned to producing more outwardly absurd tweets like “BP has pledged 75 million dollars towards the 40 billion dollar cleanup cost. #makingitright.” This is only a short distance from a typical BP tweet downplaying the Gulf crisis, like “Scientists report largely no oil impact on wildlife in #Alabama coastal marshes: http://bit.ly/ZPTPeN via @aldotcom.”
Not knowing the man behind the Twitter curtain—that it could be anybody openly mocking one of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world—was key to @BPGlobalPR’s initial sense of frisson. By the time Simpson eventually revealed himself as the creator, there was little left to say.
When Dan Sinker, the head of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, created the @MayorEmanuel account, which spun the former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s infamous volcanic temperament into a full-fledged Twitter personality, he thought he needed to maintain his anonymity throughout Emanuel’s 2010-2011 Chicago mayoral campaign. “The minute the identity is revealed, something really does fundamentally change,” said Sinker, who unmasked himself and stopped updating the account after the election was over. He cited the example of Dan Lyons’s The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, a parody blog supposedly written by Jobs that lost most of its comedic potency after Lyons revealed himself as the author, as instructive. “You’re not mistaking this as the actual person,” Sinker said. “But you’re able to suspend your disbelief and enter into the logic of the world of that parody account easier when you don’t automatically assign an additional author or face to it.”
What’s most powerful about Twitter parodies, according to Sinker, is that “if you’re following the account in real time, it’s popping up within the context of the rest of the reality you have built in Twitter.” The unreal and the real are combined in a single stream. An @MayorEmanuel tweet admonishing voters to “VOTE, BITCHES” appears at the same time that the actual Rahm Emanuel tweets “Hey hey hey…” or CNN reveals the results of the election. In this sense, Twitter seems to be a powerful answer to a fundamental problem parody has faced over the past several decades: as Menand noted, “the barrier between the authentic and the parodic has collapsed.” If parody is everywhere, if it is diffuse, it requires a medium that can properly contain and convey it—a real-time outlet. (This is also why Stephen Colbert’s character works so beautifully via tweets, outside of the constraints of his television show.)
Yet Twitter also constantly undermines the parody it creates. The primary currency of social media is fame, and it is fame that drives the authors of popular parody accounts to uncloak themselves, destroying the account in the process. If fame is all the authors of parody accounts care about, as @MayorEmanuel wrote in one of his last tweets, “it’s pretty clear that the party’s over.”
Illustration by Jordan Awan