John August

Hive Mind

Pour one out for “Hold my beer”

Hive Mind, Words on the page

Here’s a delightful structure of Twitter joke that is getting awfully clammy:

I haven’t done meaningful forensics on “hold my beer,” but my best guess is that the phrase was originally used as setup rather than punchline.

That’s how the Twitter account @HoldThisBeer uses it:

Similarly, this BuzzFeed article from 2014 uses “hold my beer” as context for foolhardy fails. That’s also how you see it used on r/holdmybeer.

In this format, “hold my beer” is the frame, not the art.

But it’s as a punchline that “hold my beer” really comes into its own.

Here’s the generic structure:

SPEAKER A: There’s no way to top this outrageous thing I said or did. SPEAKER B: Hold my beer.

Since it’s destined to die from overuse, let’s look into how it works.

Speaker A has to be well-known — at least to the target audience. If we don’t recognize the name, the rest of the joke won’t make sense. In some cases, a headline takes the place of Speaker A.

The thing Speaker A did or said needs to be plausible, with bonus points for recent. There can’t be anything strained about the setup.

Speaker B needs to be recognizable. As with Speaker A, the joke only works if you know who Speaker B is. Either the speaker is already famous, or is temporarily famous because of recent events. The speaker can also be the tweeter:

Speaker B either just did something foolish, or can be imagined doing something foolish. To me, this is one of the most interesting aspects of this structure: it works both speculatively or retroactively. But like all things Twitter, the time horizon is very short. It’s hard to imagine the joke working more than a day or two after the inciting event.

When you encounter failed “hold my beer” tweets — and trust me, I found a lot of them — it’s usually because the writer missed one of these four important aspects.

Life after beer

The carcass of a dead meme can provide home for other jokes that subvert the expected payoff:

And it’s worth paying attention to the variant forms that continue to chug along, such as “hold my drink” and “hold my earrings.”

In the end, I think “hold my beer” has been a great joke structure for a time that feels bonkers. Every day as we scroll through Twitter, we silently ask ourselves, “Wow, could it get any crazier?”

Hold my beer.

Podcaster as cult leader

Hive Mind, Psych 101

In a post that has since been taken down, Danny Manus warned that screenwriters are unwittingly being drawn into cults:

To be honest, I’m not even sure the professionals themselves are aware of their Jim Jonesy behavior and what type of insulated, self-aggrandizing, arrogant dome of cynicism and power they are creating. So, in hopes that there is still time to save others from drinking the Kool-Aid, and as a public service to inform those unknowingly responsible, here are some ways to know if you’re leading a cult.

…

– You cast aspersions on outside computer programs or software your followers may use (…and then launch your own and charge for it).

– You advise your followers that they need to move closer to you, and can only truly be part of your world if they are living nearby in the same town.

– You create your own terminology for words and concepts that don’t require new terminology (or perhaps your own FONT because the font others use aren’t good enough for you?).

While the first bullet point could apply to Marco Arment, I have a strong hunch that Manus is mostly referring to me and Craig Mazin, and our Scriptnotes podcast.

If he’s calling me a cult leader, he’s not altogether wrong.

By these standards, most popular podcasters are cult leaders.

Sound of My Voice

Here’s the thing: I’m fascinated by cults. I read books about Jonestown. I watch movies like Martha Marcy May Marlene. I wrote a pilot for Fox about an apocalyptic cult in the Santa Ynez Valley.

I know cults, and podcasts are inherently kind of culty.

Week after week, you’re hearing the same voices talking in your head about the same topics. You begin to learn the hosts’ quirks, opinions and predilections. They feel like friends even though they’re strangers.1

Podcasts never abandon you. They are with you when you’re alone in the car, or riding the train, or washing dishes. They take you out of the tedium of the moment and engage you in something more interesting.

Podcasts offer secret knowledge. Anyone can watch The Daily Show, but to listen to a podcast you have to know it exists. You have to seek it out. You have a source of information almost no one else in the world does.

Some podcasts even provide a special wardrobe, say, a t-shirt.

Yet there are some significant barriers to podcasts becoming full-on cults.

For starters, listening to a podcast is a solo experience, while cults are inherently group activities. Social media can get you part of the way — but you’d want to do some live shows so your fans can interact with each other.

Second, the opt-out is way too easy. True cults have ways to punish apostasy. With podcasts, you can simply stop listening, or delete the show from your podcasting app. No one is going to know that you bailed.2

Cult-like isn’t the same as cult

I don’t believe podcasters are cult leaders in the sense of Jim Jones. Manus is comparing the murder of 913 men, women and children to a few mean Facebook comments.

A podcast like Scriptnotes — or The Talk Show, or Serial, or the Slate Political Gabfest — does share some characteristics with a cult. It has charismatic leaders voicing an opinion. It singles out heroes and villains. Just like Apple and Android, a podcast can attract fans and fanatics.

Should podcasters be aware of the dangers of cult-like behavior? Absolutely. So should bloggers, tweeters, Viners and YouTubers. Any time you have a crowd, you have to consider responsible crowd management.

Manus writes:

Those who spout off about how THERE ARE NO RULES – but then continue to tell you exactly what to believe and think and how to act and who to do business with – are either wildly hypocritical, or completely oblivious.

I don’t think Craig and I are hypocritical or oblivious. We’re mindful of our responsibility to both our audience and the industry, and always aim to be inclusive rather than isolationist. If we’re cult leaders, we suck at it.

But I guess that’s what a modern cult leader would say.

  1. Meeting people in person, I’ve experienced both sides of this asymmetric familiarity. It’s weird both ways. ↩
  2. I’ve stopped listening to several of my friends’ podcasts. No, not yours. Another friend’s. ↩

Rude Awakenings

Directors, Genres, Hive Mind

As longtime readers know, I love me a supercut. This one by Roman Holiday explores the trope of characters sitting up in bed after a nightmare:


I love how the camera circles from left to right. I love that we don’t hear the screams. Stripped of context, it becomes clear what an artificial cinematic construct the wake-scream (or the sweaty wake-gasp) really is. Most people will never experience this kind of event in real life.

And yet: Movies are about extraordinary circumstances. Movies involve heroes taking a journey they’ll take exactly once. So on some level, the wake-scream is less a cliché than a signifier that yup, we’re in a movie, and we are headed on a specific kind of ride. That’s probably why we see them in the first act and not the third.

Help Stuart with AdWords

Hive Mind, Software

beeOn Sunday, we submitted our first app to the Mac App Store for approval. It’s a utility screenwriters will hopefully find useful, but it actually has a much wider potential user base.

The Mac App Store queue apparently varies wildly, so I don’t have an ETA for when our app will be available. Hopefully by Christmas.

Because our app is a good answer to something users might type into a search box (“something something mac”), Stuart will be overseeing a Google AdWords campaign to promote it. He’s reading up on all the official documentation and tips, but I have a hunch that some readers may have a lot of experience with AdWords. You might have good advice for him, both in terms of maximizing exposure and minimizing frustration.

So this is an open call for suggestions and links. (And hopefully not too much spam.) Thanks in advance.