Paco Romane Comedian, Actor, Writer
Last week my joke was featured on Comedy Central @midnight show for their #Hashtagwars segment. The show gets literally thousands of people playing and many more tweets per hashtag.
@Midnight asked it’s twitter followers to write jokes about the following hashtag #SnowyCelebrities. I tweeted a lot of jokes and but one of them made a big splash. I wrote Leonardo Dicrapitscold. It got favorited and retweeted and was even considered a “trending” tweet!
If you’re not familiar you might be asking yourself: What is @midnight?
Turn on your Twitter machine sometime after midnight Monday through Thursday, and you might notice a particular brand of dark comedy taking over your feed. The hashtag-based gags riff on topics like “#sadtoys,” where Twitter users worldwide weigh in with their own jokes, such as “Guess Who . . . Is the Father of Your Child,” “Strangers With Candy Land” or “Mr. Potato Famine.”
The cause of the sudden burst of crowdsourced humor is Comedy Central’s new late-night talk/game show“@midnight,” hosted by Chris Hardwick. As its name implies — being both an indicator of time slot and its own Twitter handle — it’s a show custom-made for the current state of interactive, social-media enabled TV viewers who aren’t content to be just a passive consumer of comedy.
But the most popular part of the show — online, at least — is the segment called#Hashtagwars, where Hardwick throws out a topic for the three-comedian panel to riff on in sort of a joke lightning round. Hardwick, and the show’s Twitter account, also asks the audience to keep the game going. The gags on Twitter come from a mix of established stand-ups (Judah Friedlander, formerly of “30 Rock,” sometimes chimes in), up-and-comers and just regular funny folks at home.
Then @midnight retweets some of the good ones and shows the best tweet on the next night’s show. It’s a formalized riff on what is already a popular Twitter game, basically an online, pun-heavy version of Scattergories.
