Earlier this week, The Babylon Bee — back on Twitter in all of their glory — tweeted out a satirical article about celebrated author and all-around lame tweeter Stephen King:
Stephen King Estate Reveals He Died Years Ago And His Twitter Account Is Being Run By A Mentally Ill, Glue-Sniffing Parrot With Tourette'shttps://t.co/4YQuAOm4iy
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 27, 2022
BANGOR, ME — Stephen King fans have long been perplexed as to how the man who wrote The Shining, the Dark Tower series, and Misery could possibly be the same guy who logs onto Twitter and tweets like a 7-year-old chimpanzee with anger issues.
Well, you can consider this mystery solved: the King estate confirmed today that the famed author actually died when he got hit by that van back in 1999, and they’ve just been releasing manuscripts they found stuffed in his dresser drawer since then. But what about the insane rants posted on his Twitter account?
Enter this little gal: Penny, a clinically insane blue-throated macaw who sniffs glue regularly and suffers from Tourette’s syndrome. Penny was hired to keep King’s Twitter account running with political hot takes and commentary on current events. She logs on to his Twitter every morning and just starts ranting like an absolute maniac on whatever the current topic is, or smashes the keys to tweet something insane about Trump.
The Bee subsequently tweeted out an explanation for their article, since apparently some people managed to miss the obvious humor in it:
A lot of people are missing the joke here, so allow us to explain: it's that the Stephen King estate revealed that he died years ago and his Twitter account is being run by a mentally ill, glue-sniffing parrot with tourettes. Hope this helps. https://t.co/JVQOjso4Jd
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 28, 2022
Recommended
Well, it seems that Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist Rebecca Makkai missed both The Babylon Bee’s follow-up tweet and the joke. Because the day after the Bee’s tweets went out, Makkai went off on a ridiculously long thread about why the Bee’s headline is, in fact, not funny.
Check this action out:
A thread about writing funny, and why this ain't it. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/NCEDksIa2X
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
First of all, before we get to craft: Punching up = usually okay. Punching up at someone funnier and smarter than you who can clap back REAL hard if he wants = unwise. Punching down regarding mental illness and neurodivergence = out of bounds, and wasn't even funny in 5th grade.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
And speaking of things breaking down, Rebecca was only just getting warmed up.
First: You generally want to end a sentence either with the reveal, or the funniest part. If you say the funniest thing early (and I'm in no way implying that anything here is funny), people hold their laugh till the end of the sentence — and then it's too late to laugh.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
Second: Just way too many words.
Third: Pick your punchline. They're going for like five different things here, and it feels desperate. (Wait, wait, if you didn't think that was funny I got another one! Wait, one more!)— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
If you think about the rhythm of this: First we get that he's dead, then we get the Twitter part, then we get two adjectives, THEN the parrot, then another descriptor. I could not make this worse if I tried.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
And, geniuses that they are, The Babylon Bee couldn’t do a better parody of a self-serious lefty scold if they tried.
There's also the fact that some words are funnier than others, and these are not funny words.
Lemur would be a much better animal. "Drunken" would be better than "glue-sniffing" or "mentally ill" or "with Tourette's" which are all two words.
"Drunken lemur" is already better.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
I'd consider "crack-addled" because of the assonance and the hard C make it fun to say, but "crack-addled lemur" is too much of a mouthful. I'm sticking with "drunken lemur."
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
Now let's go back to "Stephen King Estate Reveals He Died Years Ago." You want to grab our attention, you need to start with "Stephen King died years ago." We can work with "Stephen King died years ago, author's estate reveals."
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
BUT — although I hate to add another word here, specificity is funnier. We need to pick a number of years. Three sounds about right for the "joke" to work, and it's a funnier number than two or four.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
And now we'll handle "And His Twitter Account Is Being Run By." (The unnecessary capitalizations are doing nothing to help this, btw.)
This is where the verbosity realllly drags us down, right in the middle of the sentence.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
Bet she’s a hoot at parties.
In addition to which — this phrasing does nothing to mimic the clipped diction of actual newspaper headlines, which make good fake headlines (not this one) work.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
Case in point, some old Onion headlines that work:
"Miracle Of Birth Occurs For 83 Billionth Time"
You would kill this joke by putting "the" before "miracle" and "83"— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
Note the rhythm of that last one! The way it ends on the reveal.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
So okay, we end up with something like:
Stephen King Died Two Years Ago, Author's Estate Reveals; Twitter Account Run by Drunken Lemur.This is still VERY much not funny. There's more we can do, though.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
(Mind you, we are never going to save this joke.)
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
Popular Twitter Account Currently Run by Drunken Lemur, Reveals Estate of Late Stephen King
would… again, not make this funny, but be a little smarter as a joke, just because it makes us do a tiny bit of work to fill in the gaps.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
This is a worthy candidate for the same reasons: https://t.co/c4Nabh3HBx
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
If I were workshopping that one, I'd go with "3-year stint as ghost tweeter for deceased Stephen King" — partly for clarity, partly for the landing point.
I'm really into starting with the drunken lemur, though, and I love the emphasis on "wrapping up" as if that's the news
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
I'm gonna work off Craig's, cuz I like it. "Wraps" is shorter than "wrapping." I like the "ghost" thing but it might pull too much attention.
Drunken Lemur Wraps Up 3-year Stint Running Twitter Account of Deceased Stephen King
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
Is it funny? N…not really. But in contrast to "Stephen King Estate Reveals He Died Years Ago And His Twitter Account Is Being Run By A Mentally Ill, Glue-Sniffing Parrot With Tourette's" it is fucking HILARIOUS.
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
Is "Crack-Addled Porcupine Apologizes for Yesterday's Babylon Bee Takeover" funny?
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
Anyway: They will never be funny. But you can be!
That'll be eight dollars tuition from each of you, thanks
— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) November 28, 2022
She’s so pleased with herself.
Blue check writes Twitter dissertation in effort to convince self $150,000 debt for English major was worth it. How was that for a humorously crafted sentence?
— Phil (@RealPhillyP) November 29, 2022
Brilliant.
a 24-part thread explaining why a parody headline isn't funny is much funnier than the headline itself. https://t.co/GO2unaCLXE
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) November 29, 2022
i mean come on. this is objectively funny. pic.twitter.com/Peb5agOY5j
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) November 29, 2022
It’s true. Ironic that Rebecca Makkai is upset about The Babylon Bee doing parody when she herself is way beyond parody.
Maybe The Babylon Bee should just start doing articles that consist entirely of Rebecca Makkai’s threads. Talk about hilarious.
***
Related:
Is red-hat-triggered author Rebecca Makkai’s upcoming writing course on-the-nose or what?
***
Help us keep owning the libs! Join Twitchy VIP and use promo code AMERICAFIRST to receive a 25% discount off your membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member