everybody's a comedian

Why Mike Huckabee Tweets the Way He Does (Badly)

This guy I know on Twitter Photo: Joshua Lott/Getty Images

These days, as they say, everybody’s a comedian. Except bass player slash bass playing politician Mike Huckabee. Based on his tweets, it’s clear he’s anything but. Huckabee’s tweets are the emails from your dad of tweets, if your dad was a bass-playing former pastor. They’re written in the cadence of a joke, but with the words all jumbled. Reactions to a Huckatweet range from “Ugh” to “Hmmm?” to “I give this a Hucka-D-minus.” (Okay, that last one sounds like it could’ve been tweeted by Huckabee himself.) But according to Esquire, which produced this memorable interview with the former governor of Arkansas about his Twitter jokes, Huckabee has “the heart of a comedian.”

“When I tweet something it’s usually spontaneous,” Huckabee tells Esquire. “It’s usually provoked by something either I think is funny, or something that makes me either upset or angry, and I feel like I can respond with humor better than I could with rage.” Mike Huckabee is just another American tweeting jokes to stop themselves from crying.

It appears the incessant jokes that he drops onto Twitter like a heavy bassline are the result of his political failings:

“Once the campaign was over, there was an unshackling of my password from the campaign staff who’d refused to let me have unfettered access to the Twitter account during the campaign, probably for fear that I would do what I’m doing now. I thought, Heck, this will be fun. I’ll just tweet out stuff as I feel it. I find most tweets either totally boring or self serving in some way. So I thought, Okay, I’ll do something a little different. And that’s basically it. I tell people, and I really mean it, I do it for amusement. I have some fun with it.”

Despite the fact that he specifically says his jokes are spontaneous, Huckabee reveals his joke about United Airlines was one he had locked and loaded. You know Huckabee isn’t above an airplane joke:

I’ve said that about United Airlines for several years. I just won’t fly them. I’ve found them to be utterly unreliable, and if they have a problem, they just consider it to be my problem. [Redacted Huckabee’s plug for the airline he does use] I flew 487,000 miles last year, so I feel like I’m somewhat of a familiar person when it comes to understanding the whole process of passenger flying these days. I mean, that stuff, it just pops into my head.”

It also appears, as is de rigueur for his party, that Huckabee has acquired a taste for superficial populism, as he took on Comcast with all the ferocity of a young Mike Huckabee finding the bass tab for the Beatles “Come Together”:

I was thinking How does a person express their seething rage at a utility. What can you do just to say, ‘Okay, you screwed me, get ready pal. Here comes yours.’ That’s what it was, simple as that. But boy, did it get some response. Oh my gosh. I mean, I was getting calls from Comcast executives from the home office in Philadelphia, and all over the country, and offers of, “Hey, if you ever have a problem, here’s six people that you can contact.” And you know, I appreciate that. But then, I said this to someone the other day: How tragic is it that the only reason I got that level of response was because over 600,000 people follow me on Twitter? What about the poor guy who’s sitting there at home all day, waiting on the cable provider to show up at the appointment? How does he get their attention? I felt that there were so many people that I was speaking for. It was overwhelming.

If there is one message Huckabee wants to get across, it is “F the haters”:

My attitude is: Nobody is required to follow me on Twitter. The only people who should even sign up are the people who want to know what I say. If they find it amusing, then terrific. And if they don’t, rather than telling me to delete my account, they should delete me from their following. That’s what I don’t understand is the people who every day tell me how irrelevant, how unfunny I am, but they can’t wait, and they comment within seconds of everything I tweet. So you have to wonder, how empty is a life that sits around and can’t wait to get online and comment about something that someone said that they hate. That is amazing to me. It exposes an empty life.

For the rest of the interview Huckabee talks about how people are so politically correct these days. So, to be clear, Huckabee acknowledges his politics are incorrect. But you know what is correct? These sweet bass licks:

Why Mike Huckabee Tweets Bad Jokes