@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 commonly referred to as dril (the handle without the at sign) or wint (the user's display name), both rendered lowercase but often capitalized by others. Since the account started in 2008, dril has become a popular and influential Twitter user with more than one million followers.
dril is one of the most notable accounts associated with "Weird Twitter", a subculture on the site that shares a surreal or ironic sense of humor. The character associated with dril is considered highly distinctive and has been described, among other things, as akin to a bizarre reflection of a typical male American Internet user. dril's tweets are frequently satirical, and others have repurposed dril's tweets for satiric effect in a variety of political and cultural contexts. Many of dril's tweets and phrases have become familiar parts of Internet slang.
The anonymous author behind dril remained unknown for years, and the few available details about his life fueled speculation about the author's identity. In 2017, dril's author was "doxxed" in a post that went viral and received media attention. After the doxxing, Twitter users and the press preferred to preserve dril's pseudonymity out of respect for the character's mystique and the author's personal privacy.
Beyond tweeting, dril has created animated short films and collaborated with other artists, contributing illustrations and writing for several other projects. In 2017, dril created a Patreon page so that fans could provide financial support for his long-term plans, including plans for two books. Critics have praised dril for the originality and humor of his tweets. For example, the poet Patricia Lockwood called dril "a master of tone [and] character," and The A.V. Club dubbed him "arguably the most iconic Twitter account in the history of social media."
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Biography and identity
Initially, little was known about the author of the dril account. 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.
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 that the person behind the dril account had once hired him for a project. Bakkila stated that 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.
Doxxing
On November 16, 2017, a Tumblr post claiming to identify dril went viral. Posts supposedly identifying dril's author existed as early as 2014 on Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit, but had not been widely spread or publicized. The 2017 post purported to identify him through a LinkedIn page associated with Bear Stearns Bravo, "informed guesswork," and a writing credit on Hiveswap, an adventure game based on the long-running webcomic Homestuck by Andrew Hussie.
The revelation was met with backlash and dismay among Twitter users, many of whom voiced a preference to keep dril's personal identity a mystery and preserve the author's privacy. The author addressed the doxxing on his Patreon page, writing "everything's normal. i guess im 'doxxed' now. sorry. it's fine. i donr really give a shit." In a Reddit "ask us anything" interview, dril confirmed the accuracy of the doxxing and his work on Hiveswap. He commented that the impact of the doxing had been minimal, adding that he did not have a "sordid past" to hide, but also described being outed as dril as his "[c]ross to bear".
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Tweets and writing style
Attitude and affiliation with "Weird Twitter"
dril's tweets are, as characterized by Jordan Sargent at Gawker, a series of "quietly seething and unhinged avant-garde scribblings." 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":
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 migrated to Twitter from Something Awful's FYAD board, and carried over 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 understood 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." Jonah Engel Bromwich, writing for The New York Times, said dril's style influenced the proliferation of a dialogue-heavy style of writing, akin to screenwriting, that has become common to comedy on Twitter. Dan Hitchens at Christian journal First Things noted, in an article about the use of irony on social media, that "[m]uch of the art of Twitter consists in appearing to put forward a position while giving the impression that you might be kidding," citing American author David Foster Wallace's warnings about the pervasiveness of irony in modern culture. According to Hitchens, dril is the "cult account that towers above the rest" in his mastery of irony, and dril's "inspired errors in spelling, logic, and decorum can only be produced by a clever creator, but the creator never lets the mask slip. Half the joke is our joint awareness of @dril's lack of self-awareness."
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.
Critics have described dril's voice as an amalgamation of ordinary Internet users, most of all those who are arrogant, ignorant, or hapless. According to The A.V. Club's Clayton Purdom, dril is a sort of patron saint of Internet users, or "your uncle's search history come to life and filtered through a scabrous comic sensibility, and ... possibly the most popular, beloved man on the entire internet (after, maybe, The Rock)." 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."
Comparisons to Donald Trump
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--to the extent that it has become a cliche to compare the two. "Both," according to Purdom, "are aging, endlessly aggrieved white men who seemingly do not understand core components of the internet, yet they perfectly embody its anonymous rage, its ability to turn people into lunatics being swarmed and eaten alive by enemies and trolls." 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:
Eve Peyser, in a Gizmodo article declaring the 2016 presidential election as "the Weird Twitter election," had earlier compared the same dril tweet to the "tone, structure and message" of a Trump tweet.
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." Although dril does not avow an explicit political identity, the account's politics are generally identified as leftist, an alignment common among Weird Twitter users. However, the abstraction and vagueness of dril's tweets have allowed them to be spread and repurposed by people across the political spectrum; celebrities, journalists, and former members of Republican and Democratic presidential administrations follow dril, and even the far-right Breitbart News has quoted dril on its Twitter feed.
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' [said by Kellyanne Conway], or indeed 'Brexit Means Brexit' [said by Theresa May].
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."
By the end of 2017, the staff of Deadspin declared that "[c]omparing everything to @dril" and "using Dril as a substitute for an actual joke" were trends that "should die" in 2018, asserting that dril comparisons had become an overused and lazy trope despite dril's humor.
![Mashup] Boulevard of Frozen Dreams (Green Day vs Frozen Soundtrack ...](https://i0.wp.com/imagos.club/wp-contents/uploads/2017/8/HX2F24.jpg "Mashup] Boulevard of Frozen Dreams (Green Day vs Frozen Soundtrack ...")
Influence on Internet culture
Many of dril's tweets have become internet memes in their own right. References to dril's tweets have become part of the vernacular of Internet slang, with some of his distinctive phrases becoming so ubiquitous that they are used even by those who are unaware of the phrase's origin. Although dril's biggest influence is on Twitter, his tweets are also popular on other social media platforms--for example, meme-aggregating groups on Facebook commonly share his content, and numerous Tumblr users and trends have referenced and been influenced by dril. 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.
A common piece of conventional wisdom on Twitter holds that a dril tweet can be found that corresponds to virtually any situation or statement. As described by Purdom, finding the dril tweet that mirrors something that happens has become an online parlor game, made possible because dril had "rendered a tightly written comedic exaggeration of every daily outrage and conflict from the news cycle in which we find ourselves trapped." Purdom also found that dril's early preoccupations and sensibility had an outsized, "Velvet Underground-like influence on the tenor of the internet to come."
Corncob
In 2011, dril tweeted:
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.')"
Twitter users used screenshots of the corncob tweet to point out when a person refused to acknowledge losing an argument or suffering some other humiliation. By 2017, the word "corncob" became common slang on Twitter. The Ringer's Kate Knibbs observed that, while "corncob" as slang remained limited to communities on Twitter, the "corncob" archetype 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 Twitter user described by Singal as "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
dril tweets often riff on his relationships with family members--particularly an unnamed wife, ex-wife, and multiple sons--in a manner reminiscent of father figures in American sitcoms like Married... With Children. 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:
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, some far-right accounts praised dril, interpreting the tweet as a covert signal of genuine antisemitic views. Others criticized the tweet as bigoted, even if the intent was ironic, or at least in poor taste. In response to the controversy, dril alternated between dismissing those who believed he was a Nazi and making sarcastic promises to become "less racist" with the help of donations. 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. In the Jewish magazine Tablet, Armin Rosen called the tweet "an obviously satirical performance of anti-Jewish bigotry" and "the only funny anti-Semitism meta-controversy in the history of the internet."
Other projects
In addition to his tweets, dril has many visual art side projects and collaborations with other artists. dril has made several animations, including a short film titled COW-BOY and a fictional series about the attempts of South Park creator Trey Parker and Green Day drummer Tré Cool to rename the month of April "Treypril/Trépril" and "one policeman's mission to stop them at any cost." dril has expressed interest in creating further animated films, but said he would prefer to work on projects separate from his "dril" identity.
Prior to dril's doxxing, Jacob Bakkila told the press that dril had worked on Bear Stearns Bravo, an interactive video series 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. dril designed the cover of the 2016 vaporwave/funk album Cyber-Vision by Drew Fairweather ("Drew Toothpaste"), best known for the webcomics Toothpaste for Dinner and Married to the Sea. 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. dril wrote for Hiveswap, a 2017 video game based on the webcomic Homestuck. Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff and the Quest for the Missing Spoon, a book based on a story within a story in Homestuck, lists dril as a contributing author and artist alongside Homestuck creator Andrew Hussie and Gunshow author KC Green. dril contributed art to the card game The Devil's Level--based on the Twitter account Da Share Zone--along with Green, Fairweather, Natalie Dee, Will Laren, Oliver Leach (@bakkooonn), @weedguy420boner, and Da Share Zone's anonymous creator "Admin".
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. By October 2017, dril's Patreon received $2,200 a month from fans.
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. On January 10, 2018, dril hit one million followers. Unlike most comedians with large Twitter followings, dril became popular without a public reputation or career outside of the platform.
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. In November 2017, shortly after the author's purported name was first widely circulated, dril was called "arguably the most iconic Twitter account in the history of social media [and] practically internet royalty" in The A.V. Club and "one of the internet's most unlikely treasures" in Slate.
dril's 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; The New Yorker staff writer Adrian Chen; 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."
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:
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. Another dril tweet--"IF THE ZOO BANS ME FOR HOLLERING AT THE ANIMALS I WILL FACE GOD AND WALK BACKWARDS INTO HELL"--was ranked among the site's "greatest" by Thought Catalog in 2013. In 2017, Slate counted a dril tweet among that year's best sentences, sitting alongside writers such as Umberto Eco, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Anne Carson, Mohsin Hamid, Jennifer Egan, Durga Chew-Bose, John Darnielle, and Daniel Dennett.
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