Dril

> I have no idea who dril is but i think he might be a computer algorithm. From the future. - @fart
>
>

Wint. also known as Dril is a twitter account created on 15th of September 2008 who has gained a large twitter following. The account specialised in tweeting in the fashion of absurdism, anti-humor, post-irony, and satire through the narrative of first-person social commentary. Through his exploration of certain themes of brands and online culture, he reveals his family, feuds, love life and obsessions. Oxford Student describes dril as "funny, weird, nonsensical, even a little unnerving", suggesting that dril's tweets "represent some aspect of internet behaviour".

## History

Drunk Magikoopa was a producer in the ‘animutation’ community, creating chop and screw montages on Newgrounds. These montages sought to misappropriate popular culture with continuously unpredictable shock humour. Associated with this act was an account of the comedy website Something Awful, named ‘Gigantic Drill’. He had presence in the sub-community ‘Fuck You And Die’ (FYAD), a containment board for separating hostile behaviour from the general board, which developed its own style of humour.

Members began migrating to Twitter in 2008, with ‘Gigantic Drill’ registering with the handle ‘dril’. SA admin David Thorpe comments in an interview with Vice, ‘A lot of people follow @dril on Twitter, and he was just a guy who was posting funny stuff on [Something Awful], he wasn't a front page writer [...] but he was just as much a personality in the community.’

The Twitter account was created in September of 2008, with the first recorded tweet being made on the 15th. Tweets only continued four months later in January of 2009, quickly establishing the pattern of tropes found in all of his future tweets. He handled then-contemporary trending topics such as Michael Jackson’s Death, international affairs, and pervasive celebrity worship. With each topic, dril subverts social context, meaning, and makes deliberately confusing and insensitive commentary. These tweets continue at present, with a firmly established personality.

## Influence

Dril has a considerable presence in and outside of the Twitter community. His Twitter influence and connections to other post-ironic anti-comedy acts. This includes the sketch comedy troupe Million Dollar Extreme , as well as Chapo Trap House.

Dril has cemented certain tweet formats, such as throwaway character dialogues. Dril has established widely used pseudo-grammatical conventions, including the emphatic capitalization, the misplaced apostrophe, and letter transposition. These techniques have been borrowed and applied by many others.

Dril is unrivalled. Dri is the only ‘weird twitter’ account which has over one million followers, with post-2015 tweets regularly at the very least breaking two to three K worth of favs. Numbers often several times larger than any of his contemporaries.

## References

1. ↑ http://oxfordstudent.com/2017/02/26/everything-i-tweet-real-age-dril/
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 https://motherboard.vice.com/en\_us/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful
3. ↑ https://twitter.com/mde\_never\_dies/status/52057625344479232
4. ↑ https://twitter.com/dril/status/321782242630311937