Introduction
@dril is a pseudonymous Twitter account best known for its idiosyncratic style of absurdist humor and non sequiturs. The account, its author, and the character associated with the tweets are all also commonly referred to as dril (the handle without the at sign) or wint (the display name), both rendered lowercase but often capitalized by others.
With more than 750,000 followers as of September 23, 2017, dril is a widely followed and influential account. dril is one of the most popular accounts associated with "Weird Twitter", a subculture on the site with a similar sense of humor. Although the identity of the account's author is not publicly known, the character or persona associated with dril—presumed to be male—is highly distinctive; poet Patricia Lockwood called dril "a master of tone" and "a master of character." His tweets are frequently satirical, and are also widely repurposed with satirical intent by others. dril began a Patreon account in 2017 so that fans could support long-term projects, including plans for two books.
Biography and identity
Little is known about the author of the dril account. As of 2017, the author has not been publicly identified. When asked about the account's anonymity in a private Q&A, dril responded "i am an almost 30 year old man and i could not really care less about the platform i use to convey dick jokes." Prior to creating the Twitter account, the person behind dril was a poster at the Something Awful forums under the name "gigantic drill". The first dril tweet—whose text was only the single word "no"—was posted on September 15, 2008.
@dril
no
10:25 AM – 15 Sep 2008
The @dril Twitter account then remained silent for nine months before its second tweet—"how do i get cowboy paint off a dog ."—and has posted regularly in the years since.
Jacob Bakkila, one of the writers behind the similarly absurd and popular Horse_ebooks Twitter account, claimed to have been hired for a project by the person behind dril. According to Bakkila, dril's author is a graphic designer who lives somewhere in the New York metropolitan tri-state area. John Herrman and Katie Notopoulos at BuzzFeed speculated that dril may be a collaborative project or that Bakkila himself was behind dril. Bakkila denied the rumor that he was dril, but said dril was "a friend" and that dril had contributed to the Horse_ebooks sequel, Bear Stearns Bravo.
Tweets and writing style
Attitude and affiliation with "Weird Twitter"
An article about dril in The Oxford Student, a student newspaper at the University of Oxford, singled out this 2011 dril tweet as the account's guiding "manifesto":
@dril
fuck "jokes". everything i tweet is real. raw insight without the horse shit. no, i will NOT follow trolls. twitter dot com. i live for this
4:54 PM – 13 Oct 2011
Providing a rare, (supposedly) out-of-character statement to BuzzFeed for an oral history about "Weird Twitter," dril commented on his own work and motivations:
Twitter, as I understand it, is a sort of "Hell" that I was banished to upon death in my previous life. In this abstract realm, the only thing I am certain of is that my cries are awarded "Favs" or "RTs" when they are particularly miserable or profane. These ethereal merits do nothing to ease my suffering, but I have deliriously convinced myself that gathering enough of them will impress my unseen superiors and grant me a promotion to a higher plane of existence. This is my sole motivation.
dril has been identified as one of the "most revered" and "quintessential" accounts associated with the "Weird Twitter" scene, a loose subculture of users associated with surreal, ironic, or subversive humor. Writing for Complex, Brenden Gallagher compared dril to a musician who refuses to sell out or an auteurist indie filmmaker, as Twitter's version of "the enigmatic figure that even [an art form's] best known practitioners look to with reverence." Like many other notable Weird Twitter users, dril began posting on Something Awful's FYAD board, and carried over many of the board's in-jokes and tone to Twitter. Sentences in dril's tweets, like those of many other Weird Twitter accounts, are peppered with idiosyncratic grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors, misspelled words, and eggcorns. Like many on Weird Twitter, dril's tweets have been described as having a dadaist sensibility.
Character or persona
The "voice" or "character" of the dril persona is highly distinctive. Generally assumed to be male, dril's character is strongly associated with the account's avatar, a blurry image of Jack Nicholson smiling and wearing sunglasses; a "grinning Jack Nicholson with severe persecution and self-esteem issues, poor physical health, and a bizarre love/hate relationship with cops." An article in The New York Times noted dril's influence in the proliferation of a dialogue-heavy style of writing, akin to screenwriting, that has become common to comedy on Twitter.
Critics have described dril's voice as an amalgamation of ordinary Internet users, most of all those who are arrogant, ignorant, or hapless. Will Shaw of The Oxford Student noted the familiarity of dril's "naive appeals to moderation" and "flame war posturing," and said dril "is the internet's collective id, given form. He's the internet equivalent of the Beowulf-poet; we may never know who he really is, but we recognise when he is being channelled." Christine Erickson at Mashable said dril's character was like "a spambot equivalent to the kind of crazy that Clint Eastwood portrays." At Kotaku, Gita Jackson called dril a "joke account that also inadvertently catalogues ... every way to be mad online."
In a lecture given at the University of Pennsylvania, American poet Patricia Lockwood described dril as a literary alter ego of Twitter users and the Internet in general. Comparing the account's persona to Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Lockwood cited dril as an example of new possibilities in first-person narrative that could be explored online. Lockwood said of dril:
He is a master of tone, he is a master of character; his accidents are not accidents and his spelling mistakes are not mistakes. His character is the anonymous psycho of the comments box. He has been banned from every forum. He is all-present and nothing-knowing. He is the corn syrup addiction of America and he is an expired Applebee's coupon. We worship him in a big, nude church while the police blast Kenny Loggins and wait for us to come out. We will never come out. We like Kenny Loggins.
Commenters have frequently, if sometimes facetiously, compared dril's persona to Donald Trump (and vice versa), particularly Trump's voice on Twitter and other social media. In 2017, Lockwood tweeted "in a world where dril is president ... and everyone surrounding him is also dril ..."; later, writer Parker Molloy questioned whether Trump was the anonymous writer behind dril. A 2016 article at New York magazine even argued that Trump should choose dril as his vice-presidential running mate (a position eventually filled by politician Mike Pence) because the writer perceived commonalities, even prescience, within dril's style of "incoherent, libidinous, authoritarian comment-spam" and Trump's own style of campaign tweeting. In a joke about Trump's use of social media, journalist and MSNBC host Chris Hayes said that protestors should yell at Donald Trump to log off to "see if they can get him to recreate that @dril tweet," a reference to the following:
@dril
who the fuck is scraeming 'LOG OFF' at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off
11:36 PM – 15 Sep 2012
Trump had previously been compared to the same dril tweet in a Gizmodo article that dubbed the 2016 presidential election as "the Weird Twitter election." David Covucci at The Daily Dot coined "Dril's Law" as an adage stating that "[f]or every single thing Donald Trump has tweeted, Dril did it earlier and better." Covucci also asked "What if Donald Trump is @dril? Would it be any stranger than Donald Trump being president of the United States?" Anna North, responding to Covucci's question in The New York Times, said "another explanation" for the similarity between dril and Trump "seems more likely: Donald Trump's Twitter presence isn't absurdist, it's just absurd."
Satirical content and recontextualization
Although dril's content is typically somewhat absurd or nonsensical—once called "obscene nonsense verse [with] the syntax mutilated, the humour irredeemable" by Yohann Koshy in Vice—some have noted an underlying element of satire or social commentary in dril's tweets. Surveying Weird Twitter for Complex, Gallagher commented that dril's "vicious satire of conservatives, gamers, conspiracy theorists, and other less savory aspects of the Internet is always on point, always hilarious, always in character." Fellow Weird Twitter user @rare_basement said dril's "trolling [of] Penn State fans during the molestation scandal was so brilliant, always on the right side of the issue, but super funny and subtle about it."
Other social media users frequently quote, recontextualize, or remix dril tweets for their own satirical purposes, and some accounts are even exclusively dedicated to this purpose. One such account, @EveryoneIsDril, shares screenshots of tweets by other people that sound like dril's voice. Another, "wint MP" or @parliawint, attaches dril tweets styled like teletext closed captions to images from BBC News of British politicians and journalists speaking. Although seemingly niche, the wint MP account garnered 14,000 followers by May 2017. Tom Dissonance, the creator of wint MP, attributed the account's success to its functioning as a joke on multiple levels, and for multiple audiences: "there are people who get the in-jokey references; there's a broader level of people who get politics and dril, and understand the significance of one commenting on another; and beyond that there are people who just appreciate an official figure in a suit saying something ridiculous. It's an onion of silliness." Koshy commented that wint MP "stands out from traditional forms of satire because it has no normative force. It recommends nothing about the way things should be. The political field it presents is slack-jawed, demented, putrid and amoral – there is no value beyond the scope of its image." According to Shaw, the absurd political atmosphere of the mid to late 2010s made it "the Age of Dril":
Artefacts like these are perfect satirical tools for the new age of reactionism. Gluts of nonsense are a political tool; it's been remarked that the Trump administration seems to be trying to exhaust and befuddle the opposition through the sheer volume of bad policies and public scandals, and our political vocabulary is vulgarising at hyperspeed. It's hard to think of a more Dril-like phrase than 'The Bowling Green Massacre', or indeed 'Brexit Means Brexit'.
Not all satire riffing on dril is political in nature; for example, the account @drilmagic attracted thousands of followers presenting mashups of dril tweets and cards from the game Magic: The Gathering. Ben Wilinofsky, a card player who contributed to @drilmagic, said the account and its format became a success because "Magic has a very self-serious lore that is great foil for an account that so often has the self-serious in its crosshairs."
Influence on Internet culture
dril's tweets often become internet memes in their own right. There was a Know Your Meme guide to dril in 2014, at a time when KYM pages for individual Twitter users would have been comparatively rare. Although dril is most influential on Twitter, his tweets are popular not just on Twitter, but also on other social media accounts—for example, meme-aggregating groups on Facebook commonly share his content, and numerous Tumblr users and trends have referenced and been influenced by dril. In addition to being recontextualized for satirical purposes, dril's tweets are referenced in ways that become idiomatic or are otherwise adopted into Internet slang.
Corncob
In 2011, dril tweeted:
@dril
"im not owned! im not owned!!", i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob
4:20 PM – 10 Nov 2011
As explained by Jesse Singal, "sorry to be the guy who explains the joke, but: Basically, the tweet refers to a situation in which someone is just getting massively owned (that is, losing an argument or an insult war) on the internet, most likely on Twitter, but refuses to recognize this fact, and instead of apologizing or just going offline for a while, steamrolls ahead, insisting the entire time that they are not, in fact, owned. (See also: 'I'm not mad.')"
After the tweet was posted, some Twitter users would sometimes juxtapose a screenshot of it with another tweet to indicate that the targeted person refused to acknowledge losing an argument or suffering some other humiliation. Use of the term "corncob" in this sense—without also quoting the source tweet for context—became widespread on Twitter in 2017. The Ringer's Kate Knibbs observed that, while use and familiarity with the slang use of "corncob" remained limited to communities on Twitter, the term represents an archetype that is universal and identifiable throughout contemporary culture. According to Knibbs, "the condition of being a corn cob—of allowing yourself to be defined by and reduced to a piercing insistence that a perceived slight has not diminished you—[has] spread far beyond a small corner of Twitter." Among public figures whose recent behavior fit the "corncob" archetype, Knibbs listed Donald Trump, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, actress Louise Linton, Kim Kardashian's friend Jonathan Cheban, Kanye West (noting his numerous outbursts and 2016 song "Famous"), and Taylor Swift (noting her 2017 song "Look What You Made Me Do").
The term "corncob" became controversial after the reference was used in a meme with leftist criticisms of Kamala Harris, a Democrat and Californian Senator who is widely believed to be a 2020 presidential contender. The political commentator Al Giordano incorrectly asserted, citing a dated Urban Dictionary definition of "corncobbed," that "[e]very cretin who has spread this meme needs to reckon with how it uses 'corncob,' a rape culture and homophobic term popular among dudebros." Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress and an advisor on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, called on "a random Ohio State student" to "denounce" the corncob meme. Various news publications reported on the story, and noted that the fast pace of Twitter discourse and unusual slang and in-jokes meant that a misunderstanding — or failure to properly look up a term — risked embarrassment and mocking for prominent Twitter users like Giordano and Tanden; Amelia Tait, writer of an "internet dictionary" column in the New Statesman, even wrote that Giordano had "exposed [himself] as ignorant of online culture" and had, himself, been corncobbed.
Large adult sons
Jia Tolentino, a staff writer for The New Yorker, credited dril as an originator of the "large adult son" trope. The trope, which Tolentino noted is common on social media and online sports journalism, involves particular observations of hapless male behavior that is "endlessly excusable: though [the large adult son] does nothing right, he can do no wrong." The character of dril repeatedly refers to his "sons," who are usually involved in the kind of "classic large-adult-son behavior" Tolentino describes as "alarming, with a whiff of the surreal." The sons are compared to Trump's sons, particularly Eric Trump and Donald Jr., and Mike Huckabee's sons, David and John Mark.
"(((Keebler Elves)))" controversy
In June 2016, dril posted a tweet that attracted controversy for its use of triple parentheses around the name of the corporate mascots of the cookie company Keebler:
@dril
i refuse to consume any product that has been created by, or is claimed to have been created by, the (((Keebler Elves)))
9:02 AM – 28 Jun 2016
Triple parentheses, or "echoes," are used online by the alt-right as an antisemitic symbol to highlight the names of Jewish people. Journalist Jay Hathaway wrote that most of dril's followers understood the tweet to be an ironic joke exploring the uncertain "etiquette around this very 2016 expression of bigotry ... Can a non-Jew apply the (((echoes))) to his own name as a show of allyship? Is it OK to use the parentheses in a joke at the white supremacists' expense? There’s no clear consensus."
As the "(((Keebler Elves)))" tweet spread, far-right accounts praised dril, interpreting the tweet as a signal of genuine antisemitic views, and others criticized the tweet as bigoted, whether intentionally so or not, or at least in poor taste. Writer Alexander Mcdonough said dril's "refusal to clarify his views speaks to his trust in his audience to 'get' his jokes" and to dril's confidence in his privacy. "Likewise," Mcdonough wrote, "[dril's] audience trusts him to make pointed satire that crosses boundaries but is never hateful. The joke is always on himself or an entrenched elite, dril never punches down." According to Mcdonough, the controversy did not seem to have any long-term impact on dril's popularity.
Other projects
In addition to his tweets, several web videos have been attributed to dril, including a fictional animated series about the attempts of South Park creator Trey Parker and Green Day drummer Tré Cool to rename the month of April "Trépril" and "one policeman's mission to stop them at any cost." Jacob Bakkila claimed that dril contributed to one of his projects, an interactive video series called Bear Stearns Bravo that was the sequel to the Horse_ebooks Twitter account. dril contributed an article to Paper on how to "break the internet" as part of the November 2014 issue of the magazine, with a front cover featuring Kim Kardashian, themed around the concept of breaking the internet. The first issue of the online magazine Extremely Good Shit, edited by comedian Brandon Wardell and published by Super Deluxe, featured an illustration of a dril tweet.
Patreon
In January 2017, dril opened a Patreon account, enabling fans to subscribe on a monthly basis to support his tweets and future projects, including "video, illustration, and long-form writing." On the Patreon, dril described working on two books: the first an elaborate art book "with a narrative adjacent to the 'Mythos' surrounding my posts," and the second a "best of"-style compilation of his tweets as a coffee table book with some original bonus content.
Reception
Over time, dril has grown from a relatively obscure Twitter account with a small cult following to a widely followed, well-known account on the site. In October 2012, dril had only 23,000 followers. By December 2014, that number had grown to 166,000, and then 567,000 by May 2017. As of September 25, 2017, dril has more than 750,000 followers.
Following dril on Twitter has often been described, sometimes in a half-serious or tongue-in-cheek manner, as one of the site's few good uses. dril's online writing has been praised by a variety of public figures, including poet Patricia Lockwood; comedian and actor Rob Delaney; writer and Chapo Trap House host Virgil Texas; and Reply All hosts PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman. In her 2017 book I Love My Computer Because My Friends Live in It: Stories from an Online Life, author Jess Kimball Leslie described dril as a "true genius of the Internet ... who's seemingly co-opted part of the human meme that is Jack Nicholson and mixed it with postmodernism and acid," and called the account's tweets "nothing short of miracles."
dril's relatively high level of positive engagement on Twitter was noted in an informal statistical study of "the Ratio," a rule of thumb or figure of merit popularly used on Twitter to quantify backlash to a given tweet. Data science startup Fast Forward Labs compared tweet statistics from dril's account to those of the politicians Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Paul Ryan, and Mike Huckabee. In contrast to the unfavorable Ratio typically drawn by politicians' tweets, "famed Twitter personality @dril's ratio is just about perfect," with New York's Madison Malone Kircher concluding "[n]ever tweet, but if you must tweet, tweet like Dril, not like Paul Ryan."
Appearances on lists of best Twitter accounts or tweets
dril is frequently listed among the funniest or best Twitter accounts. In 2012, The Daily Dot cited dril as one of the funniest accounts on Twitter and noted that reading dril's "[d]arkly funny ... odd, provocative, and clever" tweets "simultaneously brings a sense of head-scratching wonder and slightly uncomfortable chortles." Max Read, then an editor of Gawker, named dril one of the publication's "heroes" of 2013 in a year-in-review piece. According to Read, dril's writing stood out in a paranoid web landscape overrun by spambots and covert corporate marketing:
Dril is not a bot. Dril is not a human. Dril is a psychic Markov chain whose input is the American internet. Dril is an intestine swollen with gas and incoherent politics and obscure signifiers and video-game memes and bile. Dril will not lie to you. Dril will not fool you. Dril is not a hoax. Dril is not a put-on. Dril is the only writer on the internet you can trust.
At the occasion of Twitter's tenth anniversary, both GQ and Newsweek named this dril tweet among the best or funniest tweets of all time:
@dril
Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
Candles $3,600
Utility $150
4:54 PM – 13 Oct 2011
The same tweet was listed among the funniest by BuzzFeed in 2014. The "corncob" tweet was listed as the 8th most "canonical" tweet of all time in 2017 by Mic, whose Miles Klee wrote it was "categorically impossible" to select the single best dril tweet, and another dril tweet was ranked among the site's "greatest" by Thought Catalog in 2013.