Rob Gilroy: Making A Stand #48

What a week it has been. Nonstop, it was.

Not in my actual life. Any semblance of activity that’s there is slowly ebbing away. However my online life is positively bursting at the digital seams.

It hasn’t been like this since that breakout of IBS on Theme Hospital. Where once I was furiously dragging and dropping janitors onto puddles of brownish pixels, now I’m accepting followers and acknowledging retweets at a rate of HTML knots.

It all started with a joke. As most things do – a stand-up routine, an employment tribunal.

The joke in question was a topical joke. Now I’ve written topical jokes in the past, dozens in fact, yet it’s never been my strong suit.

My lack of enthusiasm for current affairs is probably to blame. It’s something I’m always trying to rectify but the problem is; once you ‘series link’ the News at 10, it’s very hard to catch up again.

The joke was about the new pound coin that was announced in this week’s budget.

Amongst the other flawless ideas to improve the economy and generate support for the government – lower beer duty, cut bingo tax, give rebates to those who don’t have an Ocado account – the government decided to rejuvenate the look of the pound coin. Any film buffs reading; think of it as a ‘currency reboot’.

The new pound coin looks like the outcome from a particularly vicious love triangle between a 50p piece, a £2 coin and a Spirograph. The joke I tweeted was this:

“I’m not a fan of the new pound coin idea. But then, that’s always been my problem: I don’t like change.”

Seldom do perfectly concise jokes come to me but this fell into my consciousness, fully-formed. I originally posted the joke late Tuesday night; it got a few replies and retweets so I was giddy with delight.

It’s not the best joke in the world but I was happy with it and thought it deserved more than one late-night tweet. I decided I would re-post it the next morning to maximize it’s potential to be ignored.

I thought it was funny and I hoped that some people would agree but the reaction that followed was genuinely surprising.

Somehow, the tweet got passed around, like a binary infection, and before I knew it; it had been picked up by the lovely people at Huffington Post Comedy UK and put on their website. At which point it spread quicker than herpes at a Chinese Whispers convention for Club 18-30.

For most of the morning I was unaware of this, having tweeted it and then instantly logged out; the social media equivalent of leaving a suspicious package at Orpington train station. When I returned to my phone, I was inundated with gold stars, green swirly arrows and very kind messages from people humoring me.

This all sounds a bit showy-offy but the real reason I mention it is because it was a new experience for me.

I’ve talked before about my uneasy relationship with Twitter. How the pressure to be entertaining grows exponentially when the follower count rises. I don’t know why this bothers me so much, but it does.

Twitter was fun when I was amusing myself but less so when I felt I had to keep people interested for fear they might wander off and follow the more charismatic Oxo Cube corporate account. But this felt great.

As the day went on the notifications kept coming, slowly dropping off once more stuff happened in the real world. Instead of panicking, I decided I needed to start posting more jokes.

My current rate of one or two every fortnight is hardly what you’d call prolific. If it were at a gig, this would be the equivalent of standing offstage making a wry observation every twenty minutes.

As I was having this thought I happened to reply to a Tweet by a fairly famous person. This is what I put:

“A promo shot from True Detective: The College Years.”

The celeb in question was kind enough to retweet it and for the second time in a day my phone exploded in a burst of activity. Blackberry never prepared their handsets for this.

This second tweet was most certainly a fluke. It had been re-tweeted by a much-loved Cyberspace-Star and it happened to be about a popular TV show. I was back to being I was Mr. Popular. And I’ll be honest; I bloody loved it.

All comedians are desperate for approval, it’s why we do it. Few are as desperate as me. This Twitter day was lovely, but it didn’t do my addiction to attention any good. With every new mention I was getting even giddier with the power.

Boy was I a funny guy! I was like the Stephen Fry of Twitter (who happens to be Stephen Fry, coincidentally).

I knew it was going to be a short-lived victory but I savored every moment. Just like I drink in every laugh at a gig, sometimes to the point of standing in silence for fear of missing a snort.

But now, my Twitter popularity is back to what it was. I am an online nobody and I’m currently experiencing a validation come-down like you wouldn’t believe.

I enjoyed my Twitter rise and fall but, in my heart of hearts, it’s better this way. I couldn’t handle that reaction to everything I posted. I would become a self-centred moron (he says while writing a column all about his own opinions).

A big thank you to everyone who was kind enough to indulge me and my ego for the day; thank you for all the nice messages and re-tweets.

And to anyone new followers; I’m sorry. I have definitely peaked. It’s all downhill from here.