The common knock on Twitter is that the microblogging site is a wasteland of people describing their lunches, shamelessly self-promoting their businesses or begging for more people to follow them on Twitter.
But
comedian Blaine Bacon saw something else: regular, everyday people
dropping one-liners that deserved to be heard. So he set up a show.
“Ben Stiller did a show like this in L.A. to raise money for charity after the earthquake in Haiti,” he said. “I saw that and thought it would be a fun thing to do here in OKC.”
After collaborating with fellow performers Zane LaRue and Ryan Drake to find the funniest tweeters in town, he invited them to come to the show and perform their favorite tweet. The diversity of the list has made setting up the show, “OKC Twitter ...Live,” fun and interesting.
“You don’t have to be a comedian to tweet funny things,” Bacon said.
Be they administrative assistants, stay-at-home moms or lawyers, when inspiration strikes, Oklahoma City residents can create some hilarious tweets.
Drake said Twitter has completely changed the way he performs comedy.
“I grew up loving guys like Mitch Hedberg and Demetri Martin and Zack Galifinakis — comedians who really embraced the one-liner,” he said.
Using his @Rayke account, Drake builds on his act constantly, workshopping new jokes and testing them on his 5,000-plus followers. The ones that get the most response go in his act to see if they can survive onstage.
Drake and local comedians Zach Smith and Spencer Hicks will perform longer sets with selected Twitter users coming to the stage in between.
“All the people I’ve asked to read a tweet have been really excited about the idea,” Bacon said. “Once I explained to them to go through and pick the one tweet that they think is their funniest, that’s when people realized how fun this show will be.”
