Andy Borowitz baffles me. Just...Here, look at this. President of the Harvard Lampoon. Acted in a Woody Allen movie. Voted #1 Twitter account in the world -- the world! -- in a 2011 TIME Magazine poll. The Daily Beast calls him "America's satire king." Recently hired by The New Yorker to be their premiere in-house humorist. How--how?!--is he so fucking unfunny? Did his personal history and all his accolades just phase in from another dimension? Is it just some massive troll job?

Look at this: "In a profile on CBS News Sunday Morning he was called 'one of the funniest people in America.'" And then look at this: his archive of contributions to The New Yorker, leading with the "Borowitz Report" Satirical News Stories he has written for them since they hired him to do so last month. The first one has Mitt Romney picking Rich Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly as his running mate. It has nearly 7,000 Facebook shares. There's one about NBC charging people to watch the Olympics without spoilers or Ryan Seacrest (Ha ha ha ha!) that has fifteen thousand Facebook shares. What. Is. Going. On.

His Twitter feed is even worse, because at least you can avoid The New Yorker -- or at worst, skip to the David Grann piece, if there is one, and then just put the issue back on the toilet tank, where it will lie undisturbed until it gets recycled or donated to the library. Borowitz' tweets, on the other hand, are incessant and prone to garnering tons of retweets and thus clogging up Twitter with the most hacky, obvious, Leno-on-a-bad-day reactions you could ever imagine to the news of the day.

Continue reading this post »

The Search for the Most Unintentionally Funny Twitter Account is a Progressive Boink feature that scours the wilds of Twitter in a hunt for the Twitter feed with the highest humor to intended humor ratio.

Will Fetters is not a bad guy. His Twitter feed reveals a deeply earnest young screenwriter truly committed to his passion project: a meditation on grief and how we carry it. He's grateful, fiercely proud of his movie, and humble when the situation calls for it.

The only problem was that the project into which he put his all was Remember Me, the movie whose climax is an insane CGI shot pulling away from Robert Pattinson as he stares out of the about-to-be-exploded World Trade Center. It sucked. Really bad.

Continue reading this post »

The Search for the Most Unintentionally Funny Twitter Account is a new Progressive Boink feature that will scour the wilds of Twitter in a hunt for the Twitter feed with the highest humor to intended humor ratio.

Corporate Twitter accounts are never not completely stupid. The whole concept of a huge corporation having a Social Media Strategy is absurd, a seeming massive practical joke the young are playing on the old and out of touch. The corporate Twitter accounts that give out coupons or hold contests for free McMuffins or whatever, fair enough, but then you have Clorox begging people to retweet a Father's Day message with "the name of [their] favorite dad!" Or, check this shit out:

Continue reading this post »