Colette McIntyre is a writer and comedian not using her college degree in Brooklyn. She writes about comedy, sex, intersectional feminism, and Judy Blume, oftentimes in all-caps, for sites like Refinery29, The Establishment, Details, and Bravo, and @calledcolette. You can see her perform in her monthly variety show I Think We’re Alone Now with Olivia Levine at New York’s Stonewall Inn or on stages (read: in basements) around the city or in front of her friends’ moms. Leading scientists theorize that she’s actually just three VHS copies of The Craft stacked in a trench coat. This week, we spoke about three of her favorite tweets, plus roasting others, getting roasted, and fictional fireworks accidents.
McIntyre: I think a good way to describe my personality is that when watching The Holiday I’m infinitely more interested in Kate Winslet’s poignant relationship with the old guy living next door to her in LA then any of steamy sexy scenes of Cameron Diaz & Jude Law smooching and flirting and I think the below tweets really convey that.
I don’t know if I truly think of this as one of my best tweets or if I just want it to get a signal boost because I need every dude that I’ve ever kissed – and some of the ladies too, let’s be real – to know that I’m doing a really great job of roasting them on the internet. If I could add a footnote to this tweet it would be that every male comedian thinks he’s the rebellious teen son from Dinosaurs but he’s really the Baby.
To the best of your knowledge have you yourself been roasted on the Internet and how did (or how would) you cope with being roasted?
I’m an opinionated fat woman who makes her living writing on the www.worldwideweb.com so yeah, 100%. Well, actually1 – are anonymous comments considered roasts? If so, yeah, all the time. My favorite time was when someone compared me to Mimi from The Drew Carey Show, to which I was like, “…true.” I couldn’t even be mad at that because it was a real-life Mulan “Reflection” moment – this person saw me before I could even see myself. What can I say? I love a problem pattern. Why u mad?????
How do I cope? Well I haven’t (yet) had to deal with a barrage of death and/or rape threats on social media like most women I know/admire do (you know, as punishment for having the audacity to…be women & take up public space?) so I guess I should be grateful? (Damn…that’s some straight-up Stockholm Syndrome shit.) I dunno, I watch too much RuPaul’s Drag Race to care about what people think of me. I mean, I’m definitely a weak insecure flesh nugget like the next person – I’ll obsessively check the comment and constantly refresh the page and memorize every word and very mournfully but very beautifully stare out of windows – but I also survived telling my middle school crush that I liked him on AIM only to have him immediately sign off (or, now that I’m looking back, block me???) in response so I think I can get over a stranger calling me “the female version of a douchebag.” (Real feedback.)
Also after graduating high school and moving to ~the big city~ some kid started a rumor in my hometown that I died in a fireworks accident. And an unreasonable number of people believed the story. Which was the greatest roast of all, in that humans I knew for MORE THAN 10 YEARS believed it was #onbrand for me to accidentally kill myself with something that drunk dads play with on their front lawns. Also because my body was fictionally roasted by the hot fires of pyrotechnic stars.
1. White Men, The Internet, 2016
IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE THE GLASS CEILING IS REAL AND WOMEN ARE OPPRESSED AND I’M A 26-YEAR-OLD GAL WHO THINKS FEELINGS ARE FOR HOLIDAYS AND SNOW DAYS. I wrote this after I started crying inexplicably while watching Working Girl, which is a criminally underrated film. I urge everyone reading this to follow Melanie Griffith on Instagram – it’s like Britney Spears’ Instagram but with more Goddess Oracle Cards, landscapes, and pictures of young Antonio Banderas. (Hellllooooooooo, nurse!)
What are your favorite subjects to tweet about?
The agony and the ecstasy of being a lady in a post-Youtube-beauty-vlogger world, not wanting to Go Out but wanting to go out, ya kno?, lame dudes, how sweaty I am, the Olympics (I really love the Olympics), the deranged thoughts that enter my mind when on a Greyhound. I tweet a lot on public buses. That should be the surgeon general’s warning on my Twitter’s packaging: “Most of these are bus tweets.”
Who are your favorite celebs on social media and do you think you would get along with them, either IRL or as “internet friends”?
Maybe everyone feels this way and that’s her beauty but I sincerely believe that I would be great friends with and a great friend to Britney Spears. I would make her late-night Velveeta and act as cinematographer/camera person when she wants to post videos of her dancing to Megan Trainor on Snapchat and I’d help her shop for Preston and Jayden at Pac-Sun and try on silly hats with her and start a tradition where I buy her a Christmas advent calendar every year because I’m sure she loves those. And a guiding principle of my life is that I aim to be a person that Amber Rose would like.
Other Cool Celebs On Social Media (NO ONE STEAL THIS LISTICLE – I’m gonna pitch this listicle): Tina Knowles, Chelsea Peretti, Stephen King.
This whole “comedy” thing is just my way of keeping busy until my career as a fashion blogger finally takes off. I haven’t yet mastered the art of draping my jackets over my shoulders because I keep making finger guns at hunks when I pass ‘em on the street but I talk about “a bold lip” at least fifty times a day so it’s only a matter of time.
Do you generally use your tweets to develop other material or do you keep them more separate?
I definitely like to float ideas on Twitter first before developing them into something bigger. Or vice versa. My siblings kindly tolerate receiving a lot of texts from me that start with “is this funny???” followed by a nascent form of something I’m thinking about tweeting. My sister has said “I don’t understand” in response to every joke I’ve ever sent her. She’s my biggest fan.
Writing can be such an isolating activity which, as a stereotypical “look at me look at me – daddy put down the bottle & look at me” youngest child, is anathema to me. That’s why I choose to do a lot of collaborative projects and why Twitter is (in theory) so appealing – it makes things feel more participatory and real. Plus it’s always good to know when something is only funny in my head/funny to me or not exactly hitting the right beats yet. Not that I always defer to my followers. The internet has been trying to tell me for years that my period jokes aren’t funny but THE BAND (i.e., me) PLAYS (i.e., bleeds) ON!!!!!!!!
What is one piece of advice you would give to someone looking to have a fun time on Twitter.com?
Never follow someone whose Twitter bio includes the word “bohemian.”
Jenny Nelson lives and writes in Brooklyn.
