Kamala Harris could be the next president of the United States simply because she’s not 10 million years old, can safely drive a car, and can reliably livestream campaign events.
But her team recently upset him by publishing one of the posts by legendary online comedian @dril in an official campaign press release, in which he jokingly wrote, “And one more thing: I’m not mad. Please don’t write in the paper that I am mad.” He really, really, really didn’t like that.
If you’re reading this, you’re either very familiar with who @dril is, or you’re completely unfamiliar with him. Whether you know him or not is up to you, and trying to explain or summarize him takes away from the appeal. But since my mom will be reading this, I’ll give you a quick rundown. Essentially, he’s an internet comedian. All of his posts are true to character, and his fans follow suit. He’s like a parody of angry, arrogant, barely literate, slightly crazy middle-aged men from the old days of the internet, like when IMDb had message boards.
Imagine a 53-year-old man who just taught his kid how to use a computer. Now imagine him writing the weirdest review of any Clint Eastwood movie you’ve ever seen, or going on a lengthy rant on Amazon about how his refrigerator is a scam, useless, and built by communists, or posting in the YouTube comments section of a REO Speedwagon song that his divorce was the worst thing that’s ever happened in modern American history, or getting permanently banned from model railroad forums, or being a bit Dale Gribble-esque, a bit Andy Rooney-esque, or having some arcane, ultra-aggressive opinions on politics, but strongly suspecting he’ll never vote. That’s about halfway there. Let’s say it’s close enough. Or you could read his Wikipedia entry, which is as long and detailed as any Wikipedia entry on a deceased president.
Back to Harris. I’m curious about this. It seems odd to try to get some internet “cool” points from @dril. He started doing this about 15 years ago, so it’s nothing new. I’m not a fan of the politician, but I wouldn’t have dared to respond so forcefully. @dril posted that Harris’ press release was worse than US support for the Israeli military and its notoriously abusive detention facilities, where soldiers were recently accused of raping Palestinian detainees.
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So I decided to track down @dril for a candid interview.
To meet him, I must first interview his business manager, bodyguard and “creator”, Paul, who happens to be a friend of mine. Paul is an introverted, quiet man in his mid-30s who chooses his words carefully. He is very polite. Basically, he is the polar opposite of @dril, who describes himself on Twitter as “a popular actor and media mogul who cured his own mental illness over 100 times.”
We talked about important issues like Israel vs. Palestine, how the Cybertruck looks even worse in person, Bruce Willis’ blues album “The Return of Bruno,” and how exhausting it is to exist as @dril, a comedic performance where people act almost as if they take it for granted. The frustration of creating something and then having an audience not treat it as a work of art, but as part of the fabric of the internet, something that just exists, not something that’s built, must run deep.
After speaking with Paul, I connected with @dril, with one strict condition: that the interview be done over email. Paul claims it was “COVID-19.” That’s fine by me, because @dril is a unique project in that it requires him to be inside a computer. Bringing him out into the LA sunshine would ruin something. This is a character who lives in a fictional world, and he’s basically a keyboard warrior. It’s like taking away George Burns’ cigar.
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I asked @dril what he thought about seeing his words at the top of a press release from Las Vegas’ favorite to be the winner of the 2024 presidential election.
“Ugh, not anymore,” he said. “This was a total surprise to me, considering that anyone who plays any role in a presidential campaign is usually compensated in some way. I know they’re not strapped for money right now. They’ve probably raised like half a billion dollars by this point, so they must either hate me or want me dead.”
This reminds me of something fundamentally weird about Twitter. @dril is incredibly valuable as a concept. He has nearly 2 million followers. He has the ears of billionaires and presidents. He had an actual feud with Elon Musk. These are people none of us would ever let through our security gates. But converting that into a dollar figure is incredibly hard, and it sucks.
So I asked him whether he thought the presidential campaign should be punished or shamed for appropriating his work in this way.
“I think they should be forced to publicly apologize,” @dril wrote, “as well as making an unnecessary and embarrassing display of loyalty to me and my post, and being compensated in full for the tweet, which I estimate is about $25.”
I told him that the estate of musician, actor and songwriter Isaac Hayes is currently suing Donald Trump’s campaign for 120,000 times its amount for playing his songs. I asked him if he felt a kinship to Hayes, another great historian who fell victim to the fundamental stupidity of American presidential elections.
“I see no commonality between the soulful style of the beloved Isaac Hayes and the garbage I have on my computer,” he says. “In fact, I should pay the new media toilet thief who stole my waste for the free exposure this incident gave me. My submission is definitely going in the trash, never in any email, especially not in any email related to the Resolute Desk. In the basement of our office.”
But would this situation have been different if the Harris campaign had used a different tweet? Does @dril’s hostility towards the unexpected boost in attention have anything to do with the posts they chose to make? No, absolutely not, but I’d love to hear it from him directly.
He responded: “Well, this is not something I would personally choose as a tweet to send to millions of people to prove some point about human emotion. I think I had a more trivial issue in mind when I wrote that tweet. I did not think that a presidential candidate would use it to ‘angry and shame’ his opponent. That would be the worst. Because I think it’s OK to be angry in certain cases, especially during an election where everyone says you could decide whether a billion young children are bombed. If I truly believed that, I’d be angry too, and that’s OK.”
And one more thing: I’m not angry. Please don’t write in the papers that I’m angry.
— Gunn (@dril) December 29, 2014
I recall what his TruthPoint co-host and occasional collaborator Derek Estevez-Olsen said when someone accused @dril of selling the account. “The truth is sadder than that,” Estevez-Olsen wrote. “The first guy killed himself with heroin and a motorcycle. The one posting now is his daughter, disabled in the war and the VA won’t pay her benefits.” He added that his source was an ongoing lawsuit and that the real @dril owed him $31,000 at the time of his death.
For posterity I ask @dril if it’s true that he sold the account, which of course I know isn’t true because it doesn’t sound true out loud.
“What do you think about these accusations? After all, if I’ve been in the business for over 10 years and people are seriously suggesting that my work is being used extensively without paying me and that I didn’t submit it myself, I’d be really upset.
“There’s no clearer indicator that I’ve been successful,” he replies. “It’s almost to the point where people are simply refusing to believe that I would post anything they don’t like, or that I’m involved in some shady marketing deal specifically designed to piss off as many followers as possible and reduce them to zero.”
He continues, “It’s something that everyone in this industry has to deal with. Take Andy Rooney, for example. When his rant at the end of CBS’s 60 Minutes started to get more and more outrageous, a lot of people with a dangerous kindergarten level knowledge of the industry accused him of selling his identity to promote another guy who looked just like him but was far less talented. I think someone tried to put a bomb in his car. It was awful.”
So here we are. It’s 2024, and I think it’s fair to say @dril has finally hit peak fame. The most famous survivor of Weird Twitter has, as far as I can tell, gone wherever his current character needs to go. There’s no shortage of material. He’s super smart, but there are no more mountains to climb.
“What role?” he says. “Haha. Just for fun. I think I’ve had enough of this shit. ‘Poster’ has become a hated and tarnished concept. Soon I will be rebranding and redirecting to creating new, unimaginable media that my followers will be very upset about. I hope to clear out about a million ‘fake friends’ as I embark on this humiliating adventure. Stay tuned.”
I have two final questions: I’d like to hear his response to the plethora of top writers and commentators who want to hear his opinion.
“They’re welcome to threaten to hit me via email, but we all know they’re not cowards enough to do that,” he says.
I asked him how, in an ideal world, he’d like to be compensated for the ridiculous prevalence of his work — like writing for The Simpsons and then somehow not getting royalties — and he has about 30 tweets that are contenders for the funniest posts ever made by a computer.
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I’m volunteering at the Betsy Ross Museum. Everyone’s asking if they can fuck the flag. But they don’t even let me fuck the flag.
— Gunn (@dril) February 20, 2012
I would like to correct my previous post about the terrorist organization ISIL. Under no circumstances should you blame them.
— Gunn (@dril) February 15, 2017
The wise man bowed solemnly and said, “There is really no difference between good and bad, you fool! You idiot!”
— Gunn (@dril) June 2, 2014
“This whole thing reeks of gender,” I yelled as I flipped over my uncle’s barbecue grill and turned the 4th of July into a shit day.
— Gunn (@dril) June 16, 2012
He defines something about the internet, and I don’t know what that is, but his style is really a part of the internet and will be for a long time to come.
“I consider it an honor to have my work screenshotted, commercialized, and used as a chess piece by some of the most annoying people on the internet in their nasty, petty arguments, alongside more elevated content like animated GIFs from NBC’s The Office and funny cartoon frogs that are supposed to represent disenfranchised young white men. I’m just happy to be a part of the conversation,” @dril replied.