Kamala Harris may well be the next president of the United States, simply because she is not ten million years old. You can trust her to safely operate a motor vehicle — and her campaign to run a livestream.
But her team recently crossed @dril, the legendary online comedian, by distributing one of his posts in an official campaign press release — the one where he jokes: “and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.” He really, really, profoundly didn’t like that.
If you’re reading this, you either extremely know who @dril is, or will never quite know who he is. You know him or you don’t, and trying to describe him or summarize him takes some of the magic away. But my mom is gonna read this so I’ll briefly try. Basically, he’s an internet comedian. All his posts are in-character and his fans play along. He’s sort of a parody of angry, arrogant, semi-literate, and vaguely insane middle-aged men from the old days of the internet, like when IMDb had message boards.
Imagine a 53 year old whose kid just taught him how to use the computer. Now imagine him writing the weirdest review of a Clint Eastwood movie you’ve ever seen, or getting on Amazon to holler at length about how his refrigerator was a scam, useless, and made by communists. Posting in the YouTube comments to an REO Speedwagon song about how his divorce is the worst event in modern American history. Permabanned from a model train forum. A little bit Dale Gribble, a little bit Andy Rooney. Has inscrutable, super aggressive opinions about politics but you strongly suspect he doesn’t vote. You’re about halfway there. Let’s call that close enough. Alternatively, you can read his Wikipedia entry, which is about as long and detailed as the Wikipedia entry for a dead president.
Back to Harris. I’m curious about the whole affair. Trying to score internet “cool” points off @dril strikes me as odd. He started doing this act about 15 years ago; it’s not exactly new. I’m no fan of politicians, but I wouldn’t have had the guts to be so hardline in my reaction. @dril posted that the Harris press release was worse than the U.S. supporting the Israeli military and its notoriously abusive detention centers, where soldiers were recently accused of raping a Palestinian detainee.
So I decided to track down @dril for a candid interview.
To get to him, I first have to interview his business manager and bodyguard and “creator” Paul, who happens to be a buddy of mine. He’s a withdrawn, quiet dude in his mid-30s who chooses his words carefully. Very polite. Basically the exact opposite of @dril, who describes himself on Twitter as a “popular and famous Actor and Media Mogul who has cured his own mental illness over 100 times.”
We talk about all the issues that matter: Israel and Palestine, how the Cybertruck is somehow more horrible in person, Bruce Willis’ blues album The Return of Bruno, and how tiring it must be to exist as @dril: It’s a comedic performance that people act almost entitled to. The frustration of crafting something and an audience not treating it like craft and instead as part of the fabric of the internet, something that just is rather than something that is built, must run deep.
After I finish talking to Paul, I’m connected to @dril, with one hardline condition: that the interview be conducted by email. He claims it’s because he has “the covid shits.” That’s fine by me, because @dril is a unique project in that he kinda has to be inside the computer. Bringing him into the L.A. sunlight ruins something about it. This is a character who lives in a fictional world and he’s fundamentally a keyboard warrior. It’d be like taking away George Burns’ cigar.
I ask @dril for his reaction to seeing his words at the top of a press release from somebody Vegas has as the likely winner of the 2024 presidential election.
“Oh, I just about shit,” he says. “It was a total surprise to me, considering people who play any role in a presidential campaign are typically compensated somehow. I know they aren’t hurting for money right now, they must have raised like half a billion dollars up to this point. So, they must hate me, or otherwise wish me dead.”
It reminds me of the fundamental weird thing about Twitter: @dril is worth a lot of money as a concept. He has almost two million followers. Catches the ear of billionaires and presidents. Had an actual feud with Elon Musk. The sort of people who would never ever let you, any of us, through their security gate. But it’s really hard to convert that to dollar one and it sucks.
So I ask him if he thinks presidential campaigns should be punished or humiliated for reappropriating his work like this.
“I think they should be forced to apologize publicly,” writes @dril, “in an unnecessary and embarrassing display of fealty towards me and my posts, as well as compensate me for the full value of the tweet, which I estimate would be about $25.00.”
I tell him the musician, actor, and songwriter Isaac Hayes’ estate is currently suing the Donald Trump campaign for 120,000 times more money than that for playing his song. I ask if he feels kinship with Hayes, another Great Man of History victimized by the fundamental stupidity of American presidential politics.
“I see no similarities between the soulful stylings of the beloved Issac Hayes and the dreck that I put on the computer,” he says. “If anything, I should be paying the new media toilet robber who pilfered my waste product for the free exposure that this incident has provided me. My posts strictly belong in the dumpster. They must never be allowed in any emails, especially not any emails associated with the Resolute Desk. They are Beneath the office.”
But would this situation be any different if the Harris campaign had used a different tweet? Is @dril’s animosity toward his new unexpected visibility related in any way to the post they picked? I mean, no, definitely not, but I want to hear it from him.
He responds: “Well, it’s not the tweet I personally would have picked to send to millions of people to prove some sort of point about human emotion. When I wrote that tweet, I think I had more petty issues in mind. I did not consider that it would be used by a presidential candidate to ‘madshame’ their opponent. And that’s fucked, because I think it’s fine to be mad in certain cases, particularly during an election that everyone says could decide if one billion toddlers get bombed or not. If I genuinely believed that, I suppose I would also get mad, and that’s fine.”
I think of something his TruthPoint cohost and sometimes writing partner Derek Estevez-Olsen said when someone accused @dril of selling the account. “Truth is sadder than that,” Estevez-Olsen wrote. “Original guy killed himself on heroin and motorcycles. Person posting now is his daughter who got disabled in war and VA won’t pay her benefits.” He added that his source was an ongoing lawsuit, and the real @dril owed him $31,000 at time of death.
I ask @dril, for posterity, whether it’s true he sold the account, knowing of course it isn’t true because it doesn’t sound true when you say it out loud.
“How do you feel about these accusations?” After all, it would really piss me off if I’d been doing an act for over a decade and people widely used my material without compensating me and seriously suggested I didn’t even write my own posts.
“There’s no clearer indicator that I’ve ‘made it,’” he responds, “that people would absolutely refuse to believe I’d post something they do not like, to the point they’d rather believe I engaged in some shady marketing deal which seems specifically designed to piss off as many of my followers as possible and make $0.”
He continues: “It’s just something everyone in this business has to deal with. Take Andy Rooney, for instance. When his rants at the end of CBS’ 60 Minutes started becoming more and more deranged, many people with a dangerous, kindergarten-level understanding of the industry accused him of selling out his identity in order to promote another, less talented man who looks exactly like him. I think someone tried to put a bomb in his car. It was an ugly situation.”
So here we are. It’s 2024 and safe to say that @dril has finally hit peak visibility. Weird Twitter’s most famous survivor has, as far as I can tell, gone everywhere there is to go with his current character. He’ll never run out of material, he’s too clever, but there are no more mountains to climb.
“What character?” he says. “Ha ha. Just playing. I think I’ve taken this shit just about as far as it will go. ‘The Poster’ has become a hated and defiled concept. Soon, I will rebrand and pivot into producing inconceivable new forms of media that my followers will find very upsetting. I hope to purge about a million ‘Fake friends’ when I undertake this humiliating venture. Stay tuned.”
I have two last questions. I ask for his reaction to the sheer volume of hotshot writers and pundit types who want a piece of him.
“They are always welcome to threaten to whip my ass over email. However, we all know that they are much too cowardly to do so,” he says.
I ask how he would, in a perfect world, want to be compensated from the outrageous ubiquity of his material. It feels like writing for The Simpsons but somehow not getting royalties. He has like 30 tweets that are all in contention for the funniest post ever made on a computer.
He defines something about the internet. I don’t know what, but his style actually is part of it and will be for a long time.
“I think it’s the greatest honor,” @dril writes back, “to have your art screenshotted and commodified by the most annoying people online and deployed like chess pieces in obnoxious, inconsequential arguments, alongside such elevated content as animated gifs from NBC’s The Office and the funny cartoon frog that supposedly represents disenfranchised young white men. I’m truly happy just to be part of the conversation.”
