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Steve Martin, long one of our most literate and cerebral of comedians, has of late taken a fancy for the small screen. The very small screen of 140 characters that is Twitter.
Inspired, Martin told NPR’s Renee Montagne, by friend Tom Hanks, he started tweeting for purely promotional reasons. ”It was logical, but it didn’t turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book. So, tweeting is really only good for one thing — it’s just good for tweeting … It is rewarding, because it’s just its own reward. It’s sort of like heaven.”
The interview was in support of Martin’s new book, The Ten, Make That Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make That Ten.: The Tweets of Steve Martin. At 112 pages and about three tweets a page (for $15), this is a decidedly skinny affair. (Proceeds go to Martin’s Charitable Foundation that supports the arts, so I don’t want to be too harsh). You can follow him for free, of course, @SteveMartinToGo, or look at The Christian Science Monitors’ list of “10 really funny tweets he collected“—and retweeted, to see if this is what you want to fill your Twitter feed with.
But even if you’re not a Steve Martin fan, the point of all the press is that in the last year and a half, Martin has built a Twitter following of almost 2.5 million. Not bad, for an old guy. Here are five tips for how he did it:
1. Tweet for It’s Own Sake: Between links, hashtags and handles, tweeting is a referential medium—but it’s also 140 characters of itself. If you read through Martin’s tweets (perhaps 1-5 a day), very few actually deliver promotional links. [UPDATE: Perhaps at most 10% promotional content. The tweet would be: .@SteveMartinToGo The Art of using Twitter like #SteveMartin: write no more than 10% promotional tweets. 14 characters? http://blogs.forbes.com/anthonykosner/?p=1396] Increasingly they are responses to his followers, but many are just pointed dada poetry: “Found small Chinese person inside my iPhone. Apple needs to address working conditions.” He also goes on extended riffs on a single subject, like a recent series about Shakespeare (“Shakespeare keeps waggling his “Shakespeare in Love” Oscar at me. I battle back with bluegrass Grammy. He scoffeth.”) or another about getting ready for the Oscars (“Oscar preparations continue: A stud has rolled behind my dresser. Setting out a bowl of Gatorade. Going to starve him out.”)
2. Curate Your Followers: Part of what has kept Martin going is responding to the best of what is tweeted to him. As he told NPR, “When people started responding, I found they were really writing well. … I was promoting my album Rare Bird Alert, and I tweeted: ‘Rare Bird Alert number three on Amazon. I’m happy as a clam. Wait — are clams really happy?’ And a responder said, ‘The chilling sound of clam laughter has caused many fishermen to quit the sea.’ … I felt like I was looking at kind of a new form of comedy, in a strange way, that was talking and response and talking and response.” If you’re Steve Martin, people will obviously want to please and impress you, but Martin has clearly been pleasantly surprised and impressed by the quality of his fan’s responses.
3. Shift the Frame of Reference: There is an absurdity in compression that can be used for comic effect in Twitter. Martin tweeted, “Finally thinking about getting a computer,” evoking all sorts of chicken and egg implications, and did a whole series from the point of view of his CAPS LOCK key. Because no one expects elaboration in 140 characters, you can dangle open fragments of thought without feeling the need to resolve them.
4: Hone Your Craft: A well turned tweet requires the precision of poetry. “Shakespeare‘s observation that ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ has never been more true than on Twitter, and, in the case of Steve Martin, that wit is his patented cracked, brilliant sense of humor,” says Paul Levinson, author of “New New Media,” in the CS Monitor piece. “The one-liner has always been the comedian’s punchline, but it has found its ideal form in Twitter’s 140-character missive.”
5. It’s a Joke: In the hands of a skilled comedian, it’s clear that the rhythm of Twitter is a lot like standup. You build your jokes, phrase by phrase, pause by pause. You bear down with a series of one-liners. You know that you’re “killing them” if you get retweeted massively.
source: forbes.com
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