Posted on 06 November 2015.
When Jonathan Sun was a student at the Yale School of Architecture, he had an exclusive agreement with his studio professor: he, and no one else in the class, was allowed to use his phone during class time. Part of this agreement was rooted in the futility of the professor’s zero-tolerance policy of cellphones—Jonathan would have likely been on his phone anyway—but it was also largely a professional consideration. Jonathan, after all, is famous on Twitter.
Since 2012, Jonathan, ARC ’15, has been tweeting multiple times a day as @jonnysun, and has amassed over 114,000 followers. His content is sometimes funny and sometimes moving, but usually both. And it is always misspelled. If you know of Jonathan at all, you know him not as Jonathan Sun, the soft-voiced PhD candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, nor the award-winning graduate of the Yale School of Architecture, but rather as Jomny, “an aliebn confuesed abot humamn lamgauge”—his words, of course.
Jonathan, however, is no regular Twitter comedian, and Jomny Sun is no regular Twitter comedy account. Though it may not be apparent without spending time on Jomny’s timeline, Jonathan treats Twitter, comedy, and the internet in the same way he treats the rest of his endeavors: seriously. Through tweets that range from funny to melancholic to moving, Jonathan seeks to redefine the medium. And maybe also find time to get his PhD.
***
Sitting in front of the main entrance to MIT while waiting to meet Jonathan, I had a peculiar realization: what if I didn’t recognize him? Jonathan, like many other Twitter comedians, does not use his real face as his AVI, or profile picture. I had seen his picture once on his personal website, where I found his email address, but it was distant in my memory. The imbalance was startling. Here was a man whose thoughts and jokes I’d been privy to for the past few years, whose tweets I’d eagerly await and share with anyone who would listen. I frantically typed his website into my phone browser, so as not to embarrass myself when we met.
Conveniently enough, I never got the chance—he approached me first. The moment was startling. When you exclusively know someone online, it’s difficult to conceive of them as a true, clothes-wearing, haircut-having, iPhone 6-owning human.
But, of course, he is: Jonathan has a soft voice and his face rests in a gentle smile. He laughs at all of my nervous jokes and is sorry to hear that I didn’t get enough sleep the night before when I offer this excuse as a preemptive apology. His movements are reserved and measured. Throughout our conversation, which unfolds over the course of the day at a coffee shop near MIT, a high-concept vegan fast food restaurant, and his lab, Jonathan not once reaches for his phone. When I stand up momentarily, though, he lunges for it. For this I have to forgive him—based on what I know from his timeline, he usually doesn’t go more than a few hours without posting.
***
Before starting @jonnysun, Jonathan had written comedy and performed back in Toronto, where he spent his teen years and received an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto. There, Jonathan joined “Skule Nite,” a yearly musical sketch comedy revue written, directed, and performed by undergraduate engineering majors. By his senior year, Jonathan was writing, directing, and starring. As part of the show, which has a budget of around $80,000, Jonathan wrote over 150 sketches (25 of which made it into the show), along with the lyrics to 10 musical numbers, all in the span of two to three months. He did all this while majoring in Engineering Science—one of the hardest engineering majors in the country—and maintaining the grades necessary to later attend Yale School of Architecture.
When Jonathan was 12, his family moved from Alberta to Toronto. The experience was formative, as it forced Jonathan, on the cusp of adolescence, to rebuild his life. “To leave an entire life behind is a strange thing, and I’m fortunate not to have done it a lot. But the move to Toronto when I was young was one of my biggest defining moments,” he says. “I actually now think of moving as an important thing, because it lets you redefine yourself and your goals and what you think is important.”
Jonathan began tweeting as @jonnysun in 2012, following Jonathan’s second significant relocation—a move to New Haven for architecture school. In moving, Jonathan left behind a community of close friends, family, and artistic collaborators—in short, a home. This sense of alienation and isolation informed the creation and characterization of Jomny—an “aliebn” himself. These themes have long permeated and distinguished the account amidst the crowded world of Twitter comedy.
Jonathan didn’t always think of the project in such lofty terms. “I started this account as an exercise, just making sure my brain was thinking about jokes,” he explains. And though the account was always inflected with Jonathan’s particular sensibility, it has evolved significantly since its inception. “When I started I was writing jokes as myself, with, like, proper grammar and syntax and stuff.” Through the natural curiosity that drives much of Jonathan’s work, though, Jonathan quickly found himself involved in the fledgling “weird Twitter” movement.
The label “weird Twitter” describes a group of Twitter users who, starting around 2011, explored improper punctuation, syntax, grammar, spelling, and voice in their tweets. The term was heavily contested at the time, and is more or less disavowed today—“you will have to use weird Twitter in quotes every time you mention it in the article,” Jonathan requests. As part of the “weird Twitter” movement, Jonathan quickly gained stature and followers. “I was drawn not only to the content of the joke, but also the aesthetic of it,” he says.
Here, Jonathan’s design and writing experience shine through. “It’s such a great medium for the way text is seen. You can infer voice and personality just from changing the spelling of you from ‘you’ to ‘u.’” For many Twitter comedians, the aesthetic of text is core. One mutual favorite of Jonathan’s and mine in this category is @tarashoe. “She’s amazing,” he says. When talking about other Twitter accounts, Jonathan’s voice becomes full of awe and admiration in the same way it does when he praises Haas Family Arts Library, or Louie, or anything else he perceives as an artistic masterpiece. “Her voice is one of the most consistent voices on Twitter. There’s this aesthetic of being casual—her tweets are so perfectly casual.” (A sample @tarashoe tweet: “i’m the guy that startups hire to say ‘we’re changing the world.’ i fell into the ballpit again but i think they can still hear me saying it.”)
Jonathan is quick to intellectualize and valorize what many would write off as useless inanity. “I love that Twitter is able to point out the absurdity of language and culture and construct.” As an afterthought, he mentions: “that’s what Samuel Beckett does, and Ionesco. It was all about the absurdity of language and how you could take things and repeat them.” He compares, without a trace of irony, Beckett to Twitter user The Jonald (@senderblock23): “He’s exactly the same. He’s pointing out how absurd language can be.” (A recent tweet of The Jonald’s reads: “Sometimes the spiciest meatball of all is knowing when to let go.”) And Jonathan is not wrong: the two are engaged in the same project, albeit in different media, and with vastly different social perceptions.
Jonathan, evidently, has spent significant time over the past few years thinking deeply about the mercurial nature of Twitter as a form—its import, its limitations, and its potential. He expounds at length on the virtues of a Twitter account called Every Word—a bot that tweeted every word in the English language—as an exercise in the gameification of language (“sex” was the most retweeted, if you couldn’t guess). He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Twitter, citing individual tweets and accounts, some of which, when I research them later, have a few hundred followers and deactivated in 2013. “Twitter,” Jonathan says at one point, “is the algorithm to find the perfect joke. You plug in anything and you get all these people attacking it from all these different perspectives.” For Jonathan, Jomny is simply one of those perspectives.
But, he stresses, Twitter can also be more than just a joke machine. For one thing, tweets are not always jokes. “When weird Twitter started—or, quote weird Twitter unquote—there were a lot of really interesting poets and writers who were just doing it because it was this fun literary exercise to be on Twitter and to write short thoughts that weren’t necessarily jokes,” Jonathan says. “Some of them had funny elements, and some of them were really heartbreaking.”
It is this model of tweeting that Jonathan has expanded and for which Jomny became famous, but this model is by and large obsolete. The Twitter scene of which Jonathan is now a part functions more as a comedy incubator, and so Jomny largely stands alone. Far from developing an exclusively comedic account, Jonathan aims to create tweets that have a message and a meaning.
As Jon Sender (“The Jonald”) explains via email, “The voice he has chosen to use (that of an alien who misspells words) caught on to such an extent that he is not boxed in by the usual expectations of a ‘Twitter comedian.’ By consistently using his alien voice, Jonny can basically write poetry on Twitter. Maybe that’s why he’s still around when so many have come and gone by now.” Many of his tweets manage to strike a fine balance between humor and melancholy, as is the case for one of his most popular: “look. life is bad. evryones sad. we’re all gona die. but i alredy bought this inflatable boumcy castle so r u gona take ur shoes off or wat.”
This is what has drawn thousands of users to Jomny, and why his account is more popular those of many of his contemporaries. “There is ‘joke telling,’ which a lot of us do,” Twitter comedian @Chuuch tells me in an email. “But with Jonny you’re hearing jokes through a character who is brilliant, visionary, naïve, and vulnerable, all at the same time. He’s a character you love to love; sort of the child in us all. Anyone can tell jokes, but no one does (or can do) what Jonny does. In the Twitter comedy landscape, he stands alone.”
***
For Jonathan, the value of sincerity was reinforced not only by looking through his timeline, but from listening to Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new Broadway musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton. “When Hamilton came out, there was an article [in The Atlantic] that said that the reason that it worked was because it was intensely unironic. It loves its subject,” says Jonathan. “And I love that idea, the death of irony. Because I think irony has its place, but when there’s too much, it ruins any genuine emotional response.”
It’s easy to see why Jonathan may be tired of irony. On the internet, and especially in the circles of Twitter comedians of which Jonathan is a part, a detached, superior irony reigns supreme. In this context, Jomny’s sincerity is revolutionary. This is one of the gifts of the Jomny persona. Though he is fully a character, his tweets often read as more truthful than other comparable accounts. Those who know Jonathan in “real life” confirm. “Jomny is Jonathan, that’s how he thinks,” explains Elena Baranes, ARC ’15, a friend from Yale. “@jonnysun is kind of the sketchbook, a materialization of the way he experiences those daily moments that are difficult to articulate.” Elissa Cristina, Jonathan’s girlfriend of five years, says, “Whether he acknowledges it or not, every perceptive, insightful, or ridiculous thing that Jomny says is 100 percent Jonathan.” There are accounts on Twitter that singularly express loneliness, humor, or joy—individual components of the human condition that a user can piece together for a complete timeline. None encompass a whole self quite like Jomny.
For Jonathan, though, this is just how art should be. “The way I’ve always approached it is that, for each person, creative output is just a desire to make sense of, or add something to the world,” he explains. Twitter is no different.
This is why Jomny’s particular branding goes deeper than it might seem. His AVI is a neutral cartoon face Jonathan drew using Illustrator, superimposed onto a stock photo of a person (there’s lots of symbolism there—go wild). While many Twitter comedians tweet using some consistent character, few have as developed a backstory as Jomny—an alien confused about human language. This is why each tweet is replete with grammatical and spelling errors—they further signal Jomny’s outsider status. These branding markers function not only to distinguish him from his contemporaries, but also to allow him enormous berth in the content he can create.
The anonymity of tweeting through a character also provides a defense against vulnerability. Part of the reason Jonathan can afford to be so truthful is because Jomny is ostensibly a character and has rarely been connected to Jonathan as an individual. “I love the idea of having an anonymous audience. I’m actually kind of uncomfortable with people I know reading it.” He laughs after he says this, though, as if it’s a discomfort he’s willing to forge through. Quitting Twitter, after all, would never be an option.
***
All this psychoanalysis aside, Jonathan is also just a funny guy. Jomny’s appeal on Twitter is his unique ability to achieve pathos without sacrificing irreverence, as is the case with his most popular tweet:
me: goodnight moon :)
moon: night<3
me: goodnight stars :)
moon: wtf
me: sry wrongnumber
moon: whos stars
moon: who is stars
moon: answer me
Like this one, many of Jonathan’s tweets play off of joke formats—common structures that Twitter comedians use to subvert social norms, expectations, or linguistic phrases. “For a while, I was obsessed with the ‘give a man a fish, teach a man to fish’ idiom,” he recalls. “A lot of these idioms have just blown up and become these really popular formats, and it’s all because it points out how absurd it is, like, why has that become an idiom?”
Here’s one of the tweets that came out of the “teach a man to fish” period:
“giv a man a fish adn he’ll say “wat is this i ordered a mcflurry” teach a man to fish adn he’ll say “how ar u the manager of this mcdonalds.”
Many of his other most popular tweets follow similar patterns:
LIFE HACK: give ur next child a normal name
ME: are u still mad that ur mother and i named u Life Hack
BAE: wats for lunch
ME: i feel like a sandwich
BAE: u dont LOOK like a sandwich
ME: [secretly been trying to dress sandwichly for weeks] oh.
His tweets can also be heavily cerebral:
using a simile to tell a joke is like using meta self-referemtial humor to seem clever
a man walks into a bar. the bartemder says ‘how is it that lines & curves can
arrange into a lamguage that lets u see this scene in ur head’
Alternatively, they can be full of longing, whimsy, melancholy, and empowerment:
they put obituaries in newspapers as if to remind us that even though all this IMMEDIATE STUFF happens, life is long and gentle and kind
evrytime i go to the zoo, i break down in front of the bird exhibits & shout HOW DID THEY CATCH YOU. U CAN FLY. HOW DID U LET THEM CATCH YOU
Or, occasionally, Jomny tweets are pointed political criticism:
‘this is your captain speaking. i bet you’re reading this in a man’s voice. well guess what! i’m a woman captain. women are captains too.’
a fun thing to do is describe urself as a suspect to a police sketch artist & u’ll get a drawing of wat u’d look like as an african American
***
Jonathan uses his Twitter to voice these thoughts and jokes because he believes in Twitter’s artistic worth as a medium. Yet despite living in the so-called Age of the Internet, and despite the widespread appreciation of internet content, his opinion isn’t shared by the wider population. Part of the problem is that on the internet, authorship is relatively unimportant. This question of authorship blew up earlier this year during the controversy over famous Instagrammer “The Fat Jew,” when several Twitter users called the content aggregator out for reposting without credit. While it was frustrating for many content producers, this was neither new nor particularly scandalous information for consumers. Many just didn’t care.
Content seems to simply appear on the web. Because sharing happens so frequently, proper sourcing is difficult, if not impossible, to attribute. And because the internet is so vast, aggregation, rather than creation, is rewarded.
While this logic may work for an average smartphone user who simply wants to check Instagram from time to time for a laugh, it patently does not for writers like Jonathan, whose aspirations are threatened by joke stealers. A few weeks ago, in order to compete with joke aggregators/content stealers (take your semantic pick), Jonathan launched Jomny Sun on Instagram, which he announced with this tweet: “HI!! im tryimg a thing: to beat the thieves, im posting som of my fav twebts on instagram myself. folow me!! i lov u.” There, in addition to posting screenshots of tweets, Jonathan writes long, free-form philosophical meditations, using his tweets as a jumping-off point.
Jonathan, via Jomny, has been vocal about his disapproval of joke theft and the means by which information is disseminated on the internet, sometimes in non-traditional ways. This past September, a Jomny tweet transcended Twitter and became a full-fledged news story. Jomny posted a Google image search result showing the middle names of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith as ‘Oliver’ and ‘Naomi,’ respectively, captioned: “omg.. Will O. Smith and Jada N. Smith.” The implication of the tweet was that the Smiths had named their two children inspired by their first and middle names.
But, as anyone familiar with the Smith canon knows, this is not the case—their middle names are actually Corrall and Koren. However, this did not stop thousands of users commenting on and distributing the information as if it were a fact, with many claiming to have known it for years; nor did it stop several news outlets from running the “story” without crediting the original tweet. Packaged as an astute observation, the tweet was instead intended as an exploration of the way content and misinformation is spread on the internet, and how content creators are often shafted in the process. “What people don’t understand is that original comedians and writers on Twitter are not making any money from tweeting their material and that they’re putting it into the world for free,” Jonathan said, speaking to BuzzFeed. “The only thing we ask for return is to be able to be credited for our work.”
After all, as much as he loves his Twitter account, Jonathan is restless, and is eager to try comedy in a more professional context. “I guess it’s because the people who are making the decisions in comedy are not the people who are on Twitter all the time, and don’t understand what it means to be on Twitter. And it’d be nice if there were more of a recognition of Twitter as playing with form, because any writing involves form,” he says. “I think the way you process and approach that is all the same: it’s all about understanding your subject and finding ways to play in it.”
He does occasionally receive offers—giving script notes, writing sketches for a few pilots—and has received some pretty high-profile endorsements, including those from comedians Andy Richter (who has an active Twitter presence), and Will Arnett, who wrote, “jomny sun [sic] is one of the funniest limited character, internet based, comedy bent, architecture students I’ve never met.” However, mainstream success—anything that might pay him to make jokes, whatever that may be—still evades him.
Admittedly, Jonathan says, part of the problem might be of his own creation. Many of the things that have afforded Jonathan his success on Twitter hamstring him in the professional world. “Because I don’t have a real human face attached to my account, from some perspectives it’s easy to write that off. Like, ‘Oh, this is some internet niche person. We don’t know if he’s actually funny, because he’s just funny on the internet.’ Or it’s just that the style of humor is not the same. I totally understand that too—I’ve built myself a specific voice that doesn’t really lend itself to writing for a late night show or writing for other people, or maybe I just haven’t demonstrated the ability or interest to do that.”
At the core of all of this, though, is the paradoxical idea that writing on the internet, though widely appreciated, has no value. One hundred fourteen thousand followers, evidently, is not enough.
***
There is one other problem particular to using the internet as a platform for writing: that of harassment. The same mechanisms—anonymity and universal access—that allow for a Master’s student in architecture to find a worldwide audience also allow for derision and harassment, to which Jonathan is no stranger. Some of it, explains Jon Sender, comes from the original group of “weird Twitter” users, for whom “[the character’s] novelty has long since worn off.” Likewise, some users deride Jomny’s earnest and empowering side—this is the internet, after all. Still others think that Jomny is only popular because of his misspellings (though I might point you to some third graders who have yet to find internet stardom who write on quite the same level). Certainly many are resentful of Jomny’s widespread success, which, to some, reads as a form of selling out—especially since Jomny came from a group as defined by its insularity as “weird Twitter.” But no matter whether the derision and mocking comes from other well-known accounts, or internet randos, as long as @jonnysun is tagged, Jonathan sees it.
For the most part, Jonathan doesn’t let it get to him. “When I first started getting haters, I would just favorite them and respond in a nice way,” Jonathan explains. “Now, I just ignore it, because I don’t want to spur anything.” This is the first time in the discussion where he seems sincerely hurt. “It was really hard at first, but it’s stopped affecting me now.” He acknowledges, though, that he has a huge degree of privilege in this point. “Whatever response I get is absolutely nothing in comparison to the responses that female comedians get. Any woman on Twitter, any queer account on Twitter. It’s making my blood boil right now.”
I recently spoke to Helen Holmes, a young journalist from New York, who said that she started receiving deluges of hatred once she had reached a certain critical mass of followers on Twitter—somewhere just over 1,000. “The first time I ever got an email from a disgruntled person with a penis, it was so stupid. The subject line was ‘hey’ and the body of the email was ‘what do you have against men’ and it was so perfect.” The novelty, though, soon wears off: “Threats and trolls online can escalate. Situations where women are targeted can escalate to the point of real danger, and harm, and emotional trauma. And honestly, even the stuff that I can laugh off pretty easily I don’t forget. Like I can laugh off someone calling me a hussy, but that word is still in my head.”
For Twitter, the problem of abuse is an existential one. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo put it simply: “We suck at dealing with abuse.” Notably, much of this abuse is coated in irony, sarcasm, or satire. Jonathan elaborates, “They hide behind that, and they’re like, ‘Even though I’m saying abusive shit, it’s because I’m satirizing it,’ or, ‘I’m just being ironic as a statement.’ There’s no regard for the fact that that stuff actually has a really negative impact on people. And there’s no difference, you’re still putting that stuff out there, you’re still putting it out into the world. Satire is a brilliant tool, but very, very difficult to do well.” Jonathan’s insistence on sincerity is as much a political endeavor as it is an artistic one: it makes the internet a kinder place.
***
Despite all the time and effort he puts into his Twitter, Jonathan is still committed to his life offline, where he is similarly prolific. At Yale, in addition to creating @jonnysun, Jonathan wrote a one-act that was workshopped at the Yale School of Drama, started writing a musical, and completed installation artwork, illustration, drawing, and research. Upon graduating from the Yale School of Architecture, Jonathan won the 2015 Parsons Memorial Medal, awarded to the “member of the graduating class who has done distinctive work and demonstrated the greatest professional promise in the area of city planning.”
This fall, at MIT, Jonathan joined the Senseable City Lab. The project seeks to use big data to explore and improve urban design and development, and explores creative production and presentation of data. This, Jonathan tells me as we take a tour of the lab, is right up his alley. It is full of beautiful things I don’t understand: data visualizations, machines, maps, and models.
Jonathan works full time at the lab, five days a week. In his copious free time, Jonathan played Chip in MIT’s production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Meanwhile, in Toronto, Dead End, a play Jonathan wrote, is having a reading. He’s also writing a rap album.
When I ask his friends and family how he manages to prioritize and manage all of this, they can’t offer much insight. “He is more likely than not an actual alien with superhuman abilities, and his Twitter account may actually just be his way of letting the world know in a subtle way,” ventures Kian Marandi, Jonathan’s friend from UToronto, and his director in Skule Nite. Girlfriend Elissa Cristina offers: “I promise you that Jonathan’s life is probably 100 times busier than you think it is. He’s always juggling way too many things, but he definitely spends a lot of his time writing jokes on Twitter. If he’s committed to something, whether it’s a Twitter account or a PhD, he’s all in.”
Jonathan isn’t sure what his next step will be. “I don’t think that doing school is more important than doing this, and I don’t think Twitter is more important than doing school either. I would say that I’m super interested in combining those two fields. My lab’s doing some stuff with creative production and creative stuff with science and technology,” he says. “But on a more practical level, I’m not entirely fixated on finishing my PhD, if something else comes along, like if comedy takes off, or if I get a cool offer. Right now, I’m still trying to figure out exactly my place in the world and what I want to do.” While he may be unsure, one thing is certain: no matter what he does, he will do it 100 percent. And he’ll probably do several other things as well.
***
A recent tweet from Jomny reads, “The treadmill is a perfect metaphor for my life bc no matter how much i think im progresing im realy in the same place but also now im tired.” But this may articulate one fissure between Jomny and his author, because it seems like Jonathan rarely gets tired. “I just find myself as a person being interested in more than just comedy. Like I love hip-hop music, I love theater, I love art, I love illustration, so as soon as you love something, you want to do it, too. It’s never satisfying just to be a consumer, you want to study what affects you about this thing, about this song, about this piece of art, and then once you find that, you want to put your version of it out into the world,” he says. Here, though, Jonathan is wrong: many people are totally fine being passive consumers of culture.
You may be able to glean this dissatisfaction with passive consumption through Jomny’s tweets. Despite being from outer space, Jomny, like Jonathan, is thoroughly engaged with this world. Following our interview, I eagerly refreshed Twitter to see what his first tweet would be. It was classic Jomny:
teacher: whats the scariest thing abot haloween
susie: ghosts!!!!
tommy: skeletons!!!!!
jill: seeing societys implicit racism made explicit
The tweet was based on a brief aside in our conversation that I had since forgotten—I was still thinking about comedy and art and joke thieves—but Jonathan had gravitated towards a moment of insightful cultural contemplation. The alien had just roughed up the spelling a little.
