Comedian @XplodingUnicorn Explains How He Built His Following 140 Characters At A Time

I'm a big fan of comedy. There are a handful of comedians I follow on a list on Twitter called "You're Very Funny." One of those people goes by the name @XplodingUnicorn. I interviewed comedy writer James Breakwell (@XplodingUnicorn) for Forbes and he was so funny I wanted to share his comments with you on LinkedIn. I was curious to know more about the process Breakwell takes in order to pump out the thousands of jokes he sends in 140 characters or less.

Blake Morgan: What is your creative process for writing jokes and sending out Tweets?

James Breakwell: “Process” is probably the wrong word for what I do. So is “creative.” And “jokes.”

My meandering attempts at humor come from everywhere. Usually, something annoying happens and I make up a tweet loosely related to it since I’m incapable of dealing with the situation like an adult. Occasionally, I get lucky and my kids say something ridiculous and basically gift wrap a tweet for me. I waste a lot of money on their food, clothing, and shelter. The least they can do is give me 140 characters worth of content every now and then. My wife is currently pregnant with our fourth daughter solely because I ran out of joke ideas.

But more often than not, there’s nothing going on in my life and I have to come up with content on my own. I stare at a blank screen and rack my brain for ideas while my soul slowly fills with self-loathing and existential dread. It’s not like I sit in a soundproof meditation chamber while I make up this stuff. Usually, my kids are pulling at my pant leg or my wife is glaring at me or my boss is threatening to fire me if I don’t put down my phone. Generally, the harder I’m failing at real life, the better I’m doing at Twitter. If you see a tweet of mine that makes you laugh really hard, chances are I wrote it while my house was on fire.

I have no discernible skills or talents - I’m an English major, after all - so if I can write popular tweets, anyone can. Here’s all you have to do: Think of something kind of funny. Spend half an hour crafting it into 140 characters of sheer perfection. Proofread it two dozen times. Post it. Notice a typo. Delete it and post it again. Watch as it bombs. Delete it after two minutes on your timeline. Repeat as necessary until you say to hell with it and join Instagram instead.

Morgan: What suggestions do you have for other people who want to build a following like you have on Twitter?

Breakwell: Don’t.

That one little word just saved your job and your marriage. Feel free to thank me at your earliest convenience. I accept most major credit cards.

Building a large Twitter following is like building a pyramid: It’s massively difficult and hugely time consuming and when it’s done all you have to show for it is a gaudy monument to your own narcissism. To grow my Twitter account, I’ve written more than 12,500 jokes, each one a brick in the tomb where my social life went to die. There is no shortcut – except maybe slave labor. The pharaohs were a step ahead of me on that one.

Of course, that’s only for the comedy side of things. I’ve heard rumors that some people use tweets to share news or discuss important issues. These people are monsters who should be avoided at all costs. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I have useful information that people need to know,” delete your Twitter account and go read a book. The only users who succeed at Twitter are the ones who pump out pointless jokes and have nothing of value to contribute to society. That’s why I’m being interviewed for this story.

Morgan: What types of jokes/tweets perform well for you?

Breakwell: People on Twitter like my children a lot more than they like me (Although to be fair, people like pretty much everything more than they like me). I write jokes on countless other topics, but if it

doesn’t involve my kids, it gets shunned by everybody. Thank goodness I live in an age when strangers can give me the gift of rejection from thousands of miles away.

I’m on Twitter to make people laugh, not to write a 140-character mommy blog. Some of my tweets are true, some are exaggerated, and some are made up, but most of them are at least inspired by my kids. I’m upfront about that, but I still get called out as a fraud occasionally by new followers who think they’re blowing the lid off a sinister cover-up. I wish there was a conspiracy, especially if the Freemasons were involved. Then my timeline would finally get turned into a movie starring Nicholas Cage. But the sad truth is I’m just an amateur Internet humorist who builds jokes on what his kids actually said when he can and what they should have said when he can’t. No one can tell the difference. The tweets people think are made-up are usually true and the ones they think are true are often made-up. Kids are always weirder than you expect.

Morgan: What are some lessons you've learned along the way (using Twitter)

Breakwell; The most important lesson I learned is Twitter is just one big sliding scale of unhappiness. When I started out, I felt let down if I didn’t get at least one star in the first hour. Now I’m disappointed if I don’t get at least 250 stars in that same timespan. In a few years, I’m sure I’ll wallow in self-pity if I don’t get thousands of favorites and retweets just for typing “lol.” My effort goes down almost as fast as my sense of entitlement goes up. There’s no such thing as success on Twitter. I’m simply aspiring to a higher ceiling of disappointment.

Another lesson I learned is someone who is a jerk on Twitter once will be a jerk again, so it’s best to block them the first time and move on with my life. For reasons my wife neither respects nor understands, I spend a lot of time producing free content and dumping it on the Internet. If people like it, great, and if they don’t, they can go follow somebody else. The biggest perk of not making money at Twitter is I don’t owe anything to anybody. I don’t attempt to reason with trolls. When someone points out that my jokes suck, I simply hit the block button to punish them for being right. I now live in a wonderful bubble where people either love me or they don’t exist. This must be what it feels like to be Kim Jong-un.

Morgan: What are some of the positives that have come out of using Twitter for your personally or professionally?

Breakwell: Twitter taught me the power of being brief, my long-winded answers to these questions notwithstanding. I spent years doing my comedy writing in the form of 1,000-word articles (www.ExplodingUnicorn.com), but I never built up much of a following. When I switched to Twitter, things finally took off. The less of me people are exposed to, the less of a chance I have to drive them away. If Twitter shortened the character limit from 140 to zero, I’d have a million followers.

I’ve taken that shorter-is-better logic into other mediums. Since joining Twitter, I’ve started two daily webcomics (www.JamesBreakwell.com and www.Unfridgeworthy.com), and I plan to relaunch a third comic (www.WombatDojo.com) in collaboration with artist Jim Brown in the coming weeks. Each comic is essentially a tweet with most of the words replaced by pictures. Slowly but surely, I’m eliminating literacy from comedy entirely. By the time I reach my full potential, all of my jokes will be silently pantomimed by sock puppets.