An Open Letter To Comedian @ColinKane.

Hi Colin,

I’ve recently discovered you on Twitter through friends, and after reading some of your tweets I’d like to ask you some questions. As there may be some people reading this who are unfamiliar with Colin’s style of comedy, here are some of his recent jokes:

If that’s not enough for you, here’s a link to his Twitter page - https://twitter.com/#!/colinkane.

Okay, question time:

What are you doing? Seriously Colin, do you ever think about what you’re doing? Your timeline reads like an all-out assault on women. You also make jokes at the expense of overweight people, blacks, pretty much everyone except white males (your target demographic?), but women are definitely getting most of your vitriol. I don’t really understand why.
I read three of your jokes to my girlfriend. She’s certainly no prude and she has a great sense of humour. She follows some of the best comedians on Twitter and is quite hard to offend. Her response? “Those make me feel bad about myself.” Yikes. Is this the intended reaction? Why do you hate so much of the world’s population that you devote a large amount of your time to trying to bring them down? What happened to you to make you like this?

Your timeline is packed with jokes where you degrade people who don’t actually deserve it. But you never make light of yourself. You seem to be the one person that you’ve deemed as being “off-limits”. Have you ever thought about aiming at people who actually deserve to be taken down a peg or two, instead of stepping on the downtrodden? Ever taken a swing at a bully?

Do you see this style of comedy scaling up? Could you use this type of material in a best-selling book or screenplay? Can you sip coffee and talk about using women as something to ejaculate into and then dispose of on a prime-time talk show? Can you get a sitcom deal from this material (“Shit Racist Misogynists Say”)? I think you’ve really put a cap on yourself with this stuff. You’re small-time at the moment, and think you’ll only ever be small-time if this is your best/only strategy. One in four women have experienced sexual assault. Factor in how many people know and care about these people. Even if you don’t care about these people, maybe you should think about how your jokes will affect your chances of making it big when this many people will hate them. You’re swimming upstream with your current mindset, and you don’t come across as a particularly strong swimmer. Your frat boy fan-base will eventually grow up and leave you behind.

Could you ever post as much as you do now in one week, but without degrading anyone or trying to boost your own ego? That would be a true test of your wit. You already have some rare jokes that aren’t aimed at anyone, so let’s take a look:

Okay… I think I see the problem; these aren’t very funny either (you were right in that last one though, you wrote “LOL” and there was nothing to laugh about). So it’s clear you rely on degrading others for your comedy.

These were especially enlightening:

Is this one about you? Did the mask slip just long enough for us to see your true face?

Have you ever managed to make a woman feel beautiful Colin? Have you ever managed to make a woman feel loved? Because anyone can do that last thing. That’s amateur hour.

Again, is this about you Colin?
Is this what you’re like in real life? If it is then that’s really sad. If you’re not like this, how do you reconcile being a normal, caring person who acts like an uncaring douche bag on the internet? I have to point out that your photos posted to Twitter seem to be just you, all alone. Is this your life Colin? Are you a guy who takes admiring photos of himself in public bathroom mirrors because nobody else wants to be near you? Your Facebook profile picture shows you smiling against a backdrop of angry people who hate you, but in reality you run from these people by trying to block and silence anyone who doesn’t have glowing praise for you. This picture is supposed to say “I love to be hated!”, but everything else about you screams “I desperately need love and attention.”

Do you have any real female friends? A mother? Sisters? Daughters? Do you want people to treat them in the manner that you endorse? “But it’s a joke!” some will say, “It’s not real!” I follow a ton of comedians, and some of them say some pretty fucked-up things, but nothing as cruel and unfunny as your jokes. There’s a little wink that these people slip in between the lines that lets the reader know that they don’t really mean it. That wink is missing from your tweets.

When you read your replies, do you ever notice that at least half of them are extremely negative towards your jokes? Everyone gets the odd insult or criticism because of their comedy, you’d be doing something wrong if you didn’t. I’ve been telling jokes on Twitter to more people than you do for four years now, and not once have I ever had a backlash like I see you getting constantly.
Your Twitter strategy puzzles me. You seem to save a whole bunch of these comedy nuggets up and then post them all in one big chunk, and then ask for retweets. If your comedy really is as popular as you claim it is on your website, you wouldn’t have to frantically block people who leave negative comments for you (often in less than a minute), or beg people to retweet you, or retweet compliments that justify your views, or give away free tickets to your shows to fill empty seats.

With the jokes you do now, you’re basically working as support crew for misogynists and sex offenders everywhere. You are the wind beneath their dirty little wings. They read your tweets and it makes them think that the way they think and act is not only acceptable, but that it’s funny and popular opinion.

I have a sneaking suspicion that you’ll never respond to any of this. Most likely you’ll just block me on Twitter (pointless, I don’t follow you) like you do with others that negatively respond to your insults. That’s a shame, because if you really are a man who relies on his wit to make a living, then that would be no problem replying with something intelligent. If you’re a professional comedian, I’m sure you’ve spend hundreds of hours thinking about your comedy, so you’ll be able to easily defend it.

I think people should be able to tweet whatever they want, but I also think people also have a responsibility to think about what they’re putting out into the world. Do you ever stop to think that maybe you’re doing something truly awful?

Sincerely,
Mark (not your biggest fan).

P.S. Please don’t think that you’ll win any new fans from me posting this, not one of my followers follows you and I doubt they ever would.