Jeff Dwoskin interview

As part of my ongoing “Trivia Questions For…” expert interview series, I am delighted to have caught up with comedian & entrepreneur Jeff Dwoskin. For those who are active on Twitter, you may recognize him from his personal feed @BigMacher, as well as for being the Chief Creative Officer for absrdCOMEDY.com and @absrdNEWS. This past year, he also co-founded a new app Hashtag Roundup with @TheHashtagGame creator Scott Fischler, which is designed to facilitate play of Twitter’s wildly popular hashtag games.

I first discovered Jeff about a year ago, when I noticed that his hilarious tweets kept popping up in my Twitter feed after being retweeted by other funny people I follow. As someone who uses Twitter as an extension of his personal/professional brand, I have found Jeff’s feed to be not only incredibly creative and entertaining, but inspirational as well. He was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the intersection of humor and social media:

1.     You’ve found a great deal of success with social media – how have Twitter/AbsrdCOMEDY.com helped your career as a comedian?

Building a following has helped me gain some attention and meet a ton of great folks. My tweets have appeared in numerous publications and that gets me excited every time. A lot of the projects I start @absrdNEWS, absrdCOMEDY.com, @HashtagRoundup were built on a foundation of helping me, but more importantly giving a platform to others to use and enjoy. Together we are able to make great content that people really enjoy.

2.     Critics of hashtag games say they are a waste of time, yet you have dedicated a major part of your Web presence to curating/participating in them. Why?

There will always be critics. Hashtag games create an amazing amount of content. Content that a lot of newspapers, etc. constantly leverage and provide as content to their own readers. Hardly a waste of time. So much time goes into running a game and I don’t think most people realize it. These ‘critics’ think hashtag games are anomalies that just appear out of thin air. When in reality they are hand-crafted events and strategically executed. You’ll see time and time again, major publications running hashtag games as content and giving no credit to the creator of that hashtag. It’s a shame. Part of our initiative with Hashtag Roundup was to create more visibility and take it on ourselves to help news outlets understand this content should have attribution.

We curate and participate in them because they are fun and engaging live events. These live events create amazing content that deserves to be shared. That is why we dedicate so much time and space on our site to the best of the best tweets from the games.

3.     How is social media – and particularly Twitter – well suited for comedy/humor?

Facebook is a forum for your friends. ‘Performing’ in front of your friends doesn’t really give you a barometer of how funny you are or are not. Friends have a context to you that strangers will not have. On Twitter you are opening yourself up to a huge world. You have to stand only on the words you tweet. Success on Twitter to me is way more satisfying than the other social media outlets. Twitter is well suited for comedy humor whether with or without a hashtag. Twitter is an amazing forum to showcase your ‘voice’ and really build a following of people that enjoy the content you produce.

Twitter is a great tool as well as it gives you a forum to constantly be writing and keeping it sharp at 140 characters. The necessity to edit is a key step in writing comedy. Twitter gives you a great outlet to get your joke out with the least amount of words possible.

4.     What are the ingredients to a “perfect tweet?” What makes some tweets fly, while many fall flat?

Simple and to the point wins the day. However, I’ll be the first to admit I’ve had stupid tweets ‘kill’ and the stuff I think is the cleverest die a lonely twitter death.

5.     Do you have 1 great trivia question we can share with our readers?

The movie ‘Cobra’ starring Sylvester Stallone is actually a re-write of what famous movie starring Eddie Murphy?

(To answer, leave a reply in the comments section below, or send Jeff a tweet – he’ll tell whether you’re right or not!)