Lee Kern: Bitter Twitter

A theme too thin and dull to stretch to the full hour.

★★
comedy review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
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Published 17 Aug 2013

Twitter is a lot like toilet paper. It's ubiquitous. It's functional. And after you've used it, nobody should have to spend an hour watching you examine what you've found.

Lee Kern makes his audience do just that. Through the medium of PowerPoint and screenshots, this snarky Londoner recounts his vain bid to engage with self-important slebs as they broadcast every insipid detail of their lives. We find him waving for attention, dabbling in trolling and coveting the Blue Tick of Verification, all in the hope of a little acknowledgment from Peter Andre or Lee from Blue.

Unsurprisingly, each step of this journey demands fluffing up with sarcastic overstatement just to stretch to the running time. Kern knows full well that there aren't really any epiphanies to be gleaned from asking Z-listers whether they like crisps. And so, though his tone is appropriately tongue-in-cheek, there's no escaping that this a fake quest in a virtual world, with no real drama or meaningful interactions. Which, as we eventually learn in a nicely rendered moment of clarity, is kind of Kern's point.

There are a few interesting finds along the way – for example, a desolate chat room dedicated to Katie Price's ex, Alex Reid, and some Ku Klux Klan art (yes, even they're on Twitter). And Kern himself has his charms, chiefly in the blunt snarl with which he spits out his syllables. But whereas some have found fame by mastering pithy humour in 140 characters, Kern's tweets rarely offer more than juvenile, repetitive needling. The LOLs are thin on the ground.