Why typographic humor doesn't age well

One of online's most interesting forms of comedy has an unbearably short shelf life.

Back in 2015, the small faction of Twitter users I spent my time chatting with suddenly fell into the habit of talking about “true gamers.” The joke was that at the time, video game writing often made a weirdly insecure and self-aggrandizing distinction between true gamers and poseurs, so it was funny to carry that into unrelated contexts. True gamers deplored the recent violence in Afghanistan, true gamers preferred Ted Cruz to Marco Rubio, and so on.

Anyway the joke (such as it was) quickly evolved into commentary about true Twitter posters, as if there was a tier of respectable, committed, and authentic tweeters at odds with a mob of dilettantes and pretenders. Nearly ten years later I can only defend this as you-had-to-be-there comedy, but I bring it up because it provides context for the first time people started regularly misspelling “posters” as “poasters.”

Comedy is notoriously difficult to explain, especially if you don’t want to ruin the joke. Fortunately, I do, because references to “poasting” and “poasters” have become so played-out in 2024 that weirdos from Claremont and marketing execs are doing it. And it has to stop.

“Poast” was funny because it was a subtle way to convey that you are an idiot. The sort of idiot who talks about “true posters”. It was also funny because it was an improbable and vaguely pretentious misspelling to have made accidentally, somehow more complicated than such a simple word needs to be.

In other words, like basically all typographical humor, it was funny insofar as it seemed like an unplanned and stupid mistake.

There’s a whole genre of online humor like this. A while back there was a fad where everyone thought it was hilarious to end your sentences with two commas,,. In 2019 people kept posting “im baby” for some reason, and as a rule you were not supposed to use an apostrophe. The decade before people loved to do this (!!!!1!1!) as if they had accidentally released the shift key while typing exclamation points. Famed Twitter poster Dril has made an online career out of typographical humor, and his method is instructive: he is always finding new and innovative ways to fuck up writing. Here’s one from just a few days ago:

Some of the mistakes here are obvious, like “lept” instead of “leapt” and “yoo hoo” instead of “Yoo-hoo,” but there’s even more going on here — the inexplicable space after “food” in his display name, for example. That kind of mistake buttresses the rest of the joke because it makes the post look like the work of someone with some kind of bizarre linguistic pathology rather than the forced mistake of a try-hard Twitter comic.

And that’s precisely why particular instances of this humor always stagnates so fast. You can only see “poast” so many times before you can no longer suspend your disbelief and pretend that it’s an actual typo. When you see a political operative or a marketing professional doing this in 2024 you can almost hear the focus-group zoomer who told him that the kids will love it.

I don’t mean to be some kind of avante garde comedy snob about this; I get that we can’t all be on the cutting edge of new jokes, a point that’s becoming painfully clear as I get older. But the problem with stale typographic humor isn’t that too many people are doing it or that it’s just too old. The problem is baked into the form of the humor itself: it has to seem at least a little spontaneous and unintentional to land.