It happened over the weekend, but honestly, there’s never not a great time to highlight a magnificent Twitter beat down, even if in this instance, the target — Salon.com — is not so much a bad guy like Donald Trump, but a website that’s gotten increasingly humorless and full of itself over the years, taking the the far left buzzkill stance on practically every issue. It’s still a smart site (full disclosure: My humorless writings appear there periodically, though they may not anymore after this post), but I could go into great detail about how the once great intellectual bastion for liberals has fallen, becoming something akin to the the devil’s advocate of trolling. Fortunately, I don’t have to: Patton Oswalt does that plenty in his Twitter war.
This is how it started: You may recall that late Friday, local station KTVU f***-up massively and identified the pilots of Asiana Flight 214 as Sum Ting Wong and Ho Lee Fuk. After that story exploded Friday night, Patton Oswalt made his own joke on Twitter:
Not exactly Oswalt’s best line, but funny (and offensive only to the most easily offended). Salon.com — which has a history of picking fights with Oswalt — didn’t care for the joke, however, tweeting: “No word yet on whether Oswalt’s summer intern is writing his new material.”
That’s all it took to set Oswalt off. DO NOT MOCK PATTON OSWALT’S MATERIAL.
After that, Oswalt went to the popular Salonarticles hashtag and spun his magic.
Now, let that be a lesson to everyone: No matter how liberal, intelligent, or sharp-witted you think you might be, you are NEVER going to win a Twitter fight with Patton Oswalt.
Yesterday, Patton Oswalt even took it a step further by writing an essay defending the joke, though he was reluctant to do so:
There actually is something less funny than analyzing a joke. It’s defending a joke to someone who zero sense of humor, context or nuance. But here we go, anyway. I’ll try, at least, to make it entertaining. And brief.
Read the whole essay here (and thanks readers for the heads up).
(Via Mediatite. Hat Tip: Sarah Carlson)