Tweeting comedians

In the Times, Tom Cox looks at how comics are using Twitter to hone their wit.

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” [Graham] Linehan says when asked to give six words on exactly why Twitter has proved such a successful forum for comic expression. Linehan tweets even more than [Peter] Serafinowicz — he says he likes to have a “river of conversation going on nearby” when he writes, and tends “to submerge, rather than dip in” — but many of his messages actually involve spreading the word about the work of others, adding to the sense of Twitter as a support group for housebound comedy writers. One fellow scribe Linehan turned on to the site is the comic-book artist Michael Kupperman. “I’ve never really enjoyed any form of online interaction before, and frankly I assumed Twitter represented another great step downward in terms of people’s ability to communicate.

I was wrong,” Kupperman says. “There are so many funny, clever people, and their responses to me are so sly that it pushes me to try my best.”