@CarriePotter_ is a 22-year-old student originally from Alexandria, Virginia. She lives in New York where she studies the history and sociology of social change in the United States. This week I asked Carrie to talk a bit about three of her favorite tweets, and we spoke about nannying, anti-capitalist politics, and more.
Carrie: This combines three of my favorite tweet topics: romance, anti-capitalist politics, and word play.
Do you have a favorite format for tweets—like this kind of dialogue tweet, or something else?
I don’t really think I have a favorite format overall. I think I tend to just prefer whatever works or feels like it will work best. I do like the dialogue tweets though and think they’re fun, but they don’t always work for what I want to say.
Looking at pictures of animals on the internet is definitely one of my favorite methods of procrastination, and this tweet was definitely a product of me not doing my homework. I don’t generally spend much time thinking of tweets, but I actually devoted probably a good hour or so to this one after I saw the first picture of a beluga whale looking like a dejected bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding and decided I needed to find three more.
Is this the longest you’ve spent on a tweet?
I think this definitely is the longest.
Do you draft/edit tweets at all?
I usually don’t draft or edit at all. I prefer to tweet things as they come to me. I don’t really have the attention span to think of ideas and save them for later or work on them, so whenever I tweet it’s likely something I just thought of.
This is sort of cheating since it’s technically many tweets screenshotted into one super-tweet, but the #BugFuneral story still makes me laugh and I’m glad other people enjoyed it too.
Did you notice a much different reaction sharing this story as individual tweets vs as the supertweet?
I think the supertweet is much more popular because it’s easier to share the entire story in just one tweet rather than finding all the individual ones separately. However, I think it was still more fun for the people following me when it happened to read it as I live-tweeted it one-by-one even though the supertweet has definitely reached a much larger audience.
Do you have a preference for telling real life funny events in tweets vs making up jokes? Does one or the other come easier to you?
I think I probably prefer telling real life events and those definitely come easier, but jokes come more frequently if that makes sense. It’s not every day that I find myself in funny or absurd enough situations to tweet about but those stories are always more fun to share and get a reaction to than something I’ve just made up.
Jenny Nelson lives and writes in Brooklyn and works at Funny Or Die.
