00:00 What makes a tweet funny?
00:02 - Uh. - Um.
00:02 - Um. - Um.
00:03 - Like a.
00:04 (upbeat music)
00:07 - To write.
00:10 At the heart of it, it's a need to be heard.
00:12 People posting tirades in YouTube comments,
00:15 Facebook rants, all of us out here yelling our heads off
00:17 looking for an audience.
00:19 And then came Twitter.
00:21 There are 5,000 tweets posted per second.
00:23 People all over the world shooting off their mouths.
00:26 And a lot of the tweets they write are funny.
00:30 - There was one gatekeeper
00:32 and I had to make one person laugh.
00:34 - There was a system in place
00:35 if you wanted a job as a writer.
00:37 But Twitter changed that.
00:38 You could have a potential audience of millions
00:40 and if you can make them laugh, bingo.
00:43 - Twitter evens the playing field.
00:45 A nobody from nowhere in a country no one's heard of
00:48 be as or more funny than the show runners
00:50 of billion dollar television shows.
00:53 - I'm just a dude who was working as a cashier manager.
00:56 I mean, I've come from that to a small part
00:59 on a show on Cartoon Network.
01:00 - And how was your weekend, Gary?
01:02 - I got the job at Family Guy.
01:04 It's intoxicating.
01:06 - It works in the same part of my brain as a crossword does.
01:08 - It's a Rubik's Cube, it really is.
01:10 Was that rush of standup, but I could do it in my underwear.
01:13 - How I started dating Sarah Silverman.
01:15 She sent me a message and said, "You're funny."
01:17 - It got me my first writing job.
01:20 - It's capable of lifting people up to crazy places
01:23 they've never been to,
01:24 and it's capable of crushing people completely down.
01:27 - There was a time in America
01:29 where everybody thought he was a joke.
01:31 He just exploded, and he just kept coming at me.
01:35 It was like dunking on a toddler.
01:37 - It was more important to me
01:38 than my actual family and friends.
01:40 - These ideas, these things I'm thinking of,
01:42 these jokes are a commodity.
01:43 There's something very intimate
01:45 about someone who makes you laugh.
01:47 - Your stuff is funny, people are gonna like it.
01:50 Funny trumps everything.
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01:53 (upbeat music)
01:56 (upbeat music)
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