Mel Brooks Kicks Off Twitter’s #Comedyfest With Judd Apatow
Mel Brooks helped kick off Comedy Central‘s #Comedyfest – a Twitter-based comedy festival – yesterday with Carl Reiner and Judd Apatow. Brooks, director of Blazing Saddles, joined the social media network as part of the opening event, during which Brooks and Reiner shared a conversation on comedy moderated by Apatow, and Reiner – who’s quite active on Twitter – led Brooks to start his own account.
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“It is very close to thrilling,” Brooks said of joining Twitter, according to the Atlantic. When asked again by Apatow about tweeting, Brooks said, “Explain what a tweet is.” He acknowledged the difficulties in keeping tweets under 140 characters, and mused as he told a joke that he’d have to split it up with multiple posts. “Tweeting is hard,” he said. “You’ve got to squeeze the joke.”
Brooks’ Twitter account is only one tweet deep, with a post to yesterday’s live stream of the panel from the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles. “P.S. Carl made me do it,” reads Brooks’ lone tweet. It was the only #Comedyfest event that will have an in-person audience. The festival continues today with Steve Agee’s “Vine Party,” which will share stories in six-second snippets on the new video-sharing platform, Vine.