In heaven at the buffet: Jim Gaffigan, seen here explaining holiday traditions, offered some interesting updates on Twitter last night.

As yesterday's piece about Twittering celebrities noted, there are plenty of famous people you do not actually want to follow on Twitter. You will not like the result. (Though I admit to finding Shatner charming.)

There are others, however, who are fascinating little studies, and one of them is comedian Jim Gaffigan, who had apparently abandoned his Twitter feed for something like a year and a half and reemerged about a week and a half ago, partly to promote his Comedy Central special, King Baby, which premieres Sunday night at 9:00 p.m..

Since then, his feed has been a combination of the mundane and the baffling, but as he's gotten his feet under him a little, Gaffigan has started to use Twitter for a weird brand of real-time fever-dream comedy. Things start out normally enough — "I'm tweeting from the plane. Way up in the sky. Now I can waste time even on a plane. Not that sitting on a plane is not wasting time" — but gradually become stranger and stranger, with no obvious cut-off between reality and fiction, until you get to "I am now FLYING THE PLANE." (All of this happened last night.)

Gaffigan went on to explain that while he was in the cockpit, a man had burst in, angry that he was sending too many tweets, and had shot him. "I'm dead," he tweeted. And then, "Twittering from heaven. NIce up here. Very Echoey. 'Hello' (hello, hello, hello)." And finally, "In heaven at a buffet with Carlin. What is Stalin doing here? Hmm. Should I call him Joe or Joseph?"

The novelty is going to wear off for a lot of performers who are currently using Twitter. The ones who survive will be the ones who find a way to get so much promotional punch out of it that it becomes a fundamental arm of their marketing strategies, and the ones who — and this is more interesting — actually use it as a platform to perform.

Other performing Tweeters and why this may or may not be your thing, after the jump...

 

Aziz Ansari, a very good comedian who has performed with Patton Oswalt's Comedians Of Comedy pod and who joins Amy Poehler in the upcoming Parks & Recreation, is another heavy user of Twitter for actual joke-telling — he recently spent days sending tweets to characters from The Wire. (This one, for instance.)

It can be great fun to watch funny people like Gaffigan and Ansari and Rainn Wilson of The Office try out jokes, because not all of them work — any more than all of anyone's jokes work. It's not to everyone's taste, this whole thing, because it is scattershot and random and requires you to do a lot of culling that a lot of folks are not in the mood for and/or don't choose to spend time on.

You will see bad spelling and swearing as a crutch and lots of other not-very-appealing things, but while trying to debate the overall merits of Twitter is pointless, there are going to be people who use it in interesting ways, and it can be entertaining to come across them.