Nerding Day: The Official Mortdecai Twitter Account (Patreon)

The 2015 film Mortdecai, no second half of sentence. I’ve already said more about the 2015 film Mortdecai than anyone has in 8 years, and from a direction I cannot point I feel a great sleeping darkness being awoken. Greetings, which is Mortdecai for hi, today we’re talking about the social media campaign for the 2015 film Mortdecai and it’s called:

The easiest, most basic first step of writing is Googling a thing, so it is a deliberate and insulting choice when I say I don’t know what Mortdecai is, or if it’s based on something. Was it a children’s book? A luxury toilet paper mascot? A character Johnny Depp created after being too handsome and famous to be told to shut the fuck up? I genuinely don’t care. Don’t tell me in the comments. All I know about Mortdecai is a poster campaign where they put unexplained mustaches on Gwyneth Paltrow and Olivia Munn and his Twitter account, which started with this post:

Not a great start. Or was it!? This will be explained to you by Mortdecai soon, but he’s doing a bit where he’s too long-winded for Twitter. It’s the distant sound of a cute idea done many times before, I’ll give him that, but look at this execution. This doesn’t come off as fancy. This reads like a 9-year-old getting punched out by the butler he’s making fun of. Plus, he got cut off 5 characters early, so by the rules of his own premise something has gone unexpectedly wrong.

So now we get Mortdecai. He’s a grandpa, but the basic kin– oh, he’s still going. I’ll let him finish.

So is Mortdecai some kind of misplaced historical figure? Because if someone heard “this social media platform’s deal is that there’s a 140 character limit,” and they promised to heed to such noble guidelines, I would just assume they were a wizard lost in time and look around to see if I was the wildcard or the muscle of this adventure. I would absolutely never assume they were making a promotional joke for a $60 million film.

I’m absolutely lost. “The pleasure of verbal embellishment?” Even the worst writer on the day of their darkest tragedy could see that, as a comedy bit, this is a fucking horse corpse. So maybe it’s a sex thing? Is Twitter’s character limit edging him? I still don’t know what Mortdecai is, but I’m adding “word pervert” to my list of guesses.

Alright, so after fucking up his first five tweets, he thinks he’s having some kind of gentleman’s disagreement with the developers of Twitter? And he… lost? If someone didn’t know anything about the upcoming film Mortdecai, and that was and will always be everyone, this catastrop– oh holy shit, he’s still going.

What a perfect landing. They call this the comedy rule of six. What you do is take your punchline and premise and bury them under what looks like a mistake. Then you explain the joke, explain the joke, repeat the joke, reference the joke, and then explain the joke. I can’t believe this movie made, hold on… negative thirteen million dollars!? So in a very real way, they could have NOT done this terrible thing and made $13 million.

The next day, Mortdecai followed up his introduction with this. This is a dud MADLibs of a concept– a sentence you backspace while you mutter the words “okay… tch tch tch… something about mustaches.” It is someone plainly admitting they took this Mortdecai social media gig without any preparation or ideas, and they don’t think that should matter. It’s fucking nothing, but remember, the movie hadn’t come out. There was no context to add meaning to any of this. It’s something you’d read to a scientist studying the psychological effects of unsolicited Big Bang Theory scripts on death row inmates.

The only thing this post has is a vague horniness, arguably the last only trait you want in a tweet, and people picked up on it. One of the replies was from a girl named Courtney who said, “@PartTimeRogue $100 says I could take you to the ground with my bare hands. I’m 4′ 11″ and 54kg. Not saying you’re weak. #KnowledgeIsPower” She ended up being one of Mortdecai’s most engaged fans and the first thing she told him was, “I’m wearing child-sized clothes and I could fucking fuck you up.”

The next day Mortdecai tweeted this. What’s the premise here? Is he an unfrozen elephant hunter? Is he so wealthy he doesn’t play board games, but also a guy on a Target run, only he shops at one where the employees call board games “Big Games” and make recommendations? Is he fucking looking at a Boggle box, which says, and I quote, “The 3 minute word search GAME” and not getting it? What extremely specific kind of stupid is this character? Courtney told him, “@PartTimeRogue try going to a place called Bass Pro Shop, they should definitely have whatever you need.” So it’s not great that on your third tweet your biggest fan has already threatened to kick your ass and thinks your jokes are sincere questions.

If it’s your job to run the social media account for a character wearing tweed, this is an almost unthinkable lack of effort. If you were a janitor at Applebee’s, this would be like slapping a dirty mop against the floor and telling a family, “Suck your own dicks, table ten, I’m done for the day!”

This is a great example of an unremarkable PR representative thinking, “How hard can it be to write a joke?” This has no setup, premise, or punchline. It really is just the desperate prayer the reader will, on their own for unrelated reasons, picture Prince Philip doing something funny at an airport. I guess he was 93 years old in 2014, so he could have been pooping in a diaper? Is that it? My god, was that the best case scenario for this joke?

Okay, wait. Is Mortdecai rich or pretending to be rich? I got the idea he was out-of-touch wealthy from the Boggle thing, but then they complain about their scotch being “very expensive?” It must be a clue because it’s not anything else. Yet Courtney is still genuinely trying to help. She asked Mortdecai, “@PartTimeRogue Are you sure you didn’t drink it all already?”

So for another quick recap, Mortdecai’s biggest fan has now challenged him to a fist fight, misunderstood everything he’s said, and is worried he might be too drunk to post.

“Maybe this will be a funny premise, oh no it isn’t, wait, maybe this journey I’m on is the joke.” – The unformed thoughts of someone who hates their job as social media manager for Mortdecai.

So he isn’t sure if throwing your shoe is impolite? That would normally say “confused space visitor who fucks with detachable feet,” but no: Mortdecai makes it clear this is an act of vengeance in the next sentence. He wants to punish the mailman for being so loud, and by the way, congratulations to this writer for picking a complaint as relatable as Noisy Mailman. They could have gone with something funny or quirky, but managed to choose a problem that doesn’t exist for anyone in any income bracket. “I can hear my mailman because I’m rich, but I’m also a psychopath and that’s it for today,” said the actual main character from the coming-soon blockbuster event, Mortdecai!

I think I’ve made my point that this sucks, but it’s worth saying again how much it’s failing to explain Mortdecai. He seems confused by fucking everything. He’s fancy, or maybe only pretending to be, and is probably a murderer. And this was the information you had if you had gone out of your way to read Mortdecai’s supplemental marketing material. The main promotion was only his face and the other principal cast members wearing his mustache. If you put a gun to my head and asked me what Mortdecai does, I would consider guessing “solves mysteries?” before daring you to do it.

When I think of zany characters, I picture them accidentally buying Boggle instead of an elephant gun, then going online to fill out credit card applications. I picture them hunting mailmen with shoes. Here’s what’s crazy to me: these are huge, defining choices made by someone who knows less about Mortdecai than anyone. They gave some intern the keys to this potential movie franchise and in two weeks they’ve made him an idiot criminal for an audience of Courtney. Luckily, Courtney knows why Citibank won’t allow him to use the prefix ‘Honourable.’ As she explains, “@PartTimeRogue Sadly, no one uses it anymore.”

Is trivial shrub a reference to something? Does he mean stump? I don’t understand. Is trees another thing Mortdecai is wrong about? This could have been anything. At all. And from the vast expanse of human experience, this social media manager cut down an imaginary tree out of spite then said something either wrong or stupid followed by a hashtag about how it’s legal to kill people on your lawn. I’m very troubled, fuck you, in theaters everywhere January 23rd!

“Here’s something no one knows about the titular star of an upcoming $60,000,000 movie,” said this person writing about him in an official capacity. “Specific desserts cause them to have Transpacific Slave Trade nightmares. I know! I know, but listen! ‘Buoy’ is a funny word and he was beaten with one. Coming soon to theaters everywhere.”

Courtney had no idea how to help with this, and is now treating the Mortdecai twitter account like talk therapy. She confided, “@PartTimeRogue I haven’t dreamed anything like that for years. Haven’t had nightmares for years. Not sure what that says about my psyche.”

After the success of his #StandYourGround tweet’s 28 likes, Mortdecai tried to work backwards from another popular hashtag. “I’m a dumbass fucking idiot, I don’t know, none of this matters, did I do the #IceBucketChallenge?” Courtney had no response. Some rhetorical questions are too wrong to even begin to answer.

Wait, fuck, so Mortdecai knows what nature documentaries are, but not what movies are? And hold on, shit, he’s tweeting about streaming Anaconda but talks about the Internet like he’s just now discovering it? I mean, if the bit really is only “ha ha what if someone thought this obvious action movie was a documentary” you’re already asking a lot of your reader. Why add the Internet thing? This is like saying “If the only thing that survives a plane crash is the black box, why not make the whole sky out of the black box, who is this Airplane? Indubitably, I love him!”

Motherfucker, you stupid motherfucker, in what world is this a joke? Not ours. Not yours either, because you learned the difference between scripted drama and documentaries four days ago on your own Twitter account. Is Mortdecai’s thing that he’s very dumb, but never in an ironic or funny way? Catch him if you can, because maybe he’s a jewel thief or something, only in theaters.

“I salute dogs!” begs the underperforming social media account for the anticipation-eligible film Mortdecai. I hate this for every reason, but mostly because Mortdecai goes so far out of character for it. Are you telling me the man whose only personality trait is knowing nothing about anything knows two correct things about dogs? Nonsense.

This is the Mortdecai I’ve come to enjoy. Wrong, but not in a silly or fun way. He sat down to do his daily tweet and typed an incorrect hat fact next to a couple lazy words to fill space, fuck you. If you were a janitor at Applebee’s, this would be like telling table ten, “Guys, my heart isn’t in it today. You know what to do with your own dicks. Air mop, see you tomorrow.”

The writer still hasn’t found Mortdecai’s voice, but they always manage to communicate how much they hate their job. This pointless question brought Courtney back, though; who answered, “@PartTimeRogue Depends on who you go to, but I can guarantee it’ll be over $1,000.” This might be a savage burn, because $1000 is a terrible guess for an antique car hybrid conversion, but the exact price of the bottle of scotch Mortdecai lost, and he called that “very expensive.” Is Courtney a secret genius? Are they roasting the Mortdecai twitter account with Mortdecai twitter account references no one would get until 9 years later? Oh no, I’m only one month into Mortdecai’s timeline and I’ve lost all perspective.

“You ever been in a motel? They’re not without their charms, but I would appreciate sheets with a higher thread-count than one,” says the opening act in Hell’s Only Comedy Club. You get up to leave but can’t. Shaking in horror, you look down to see your body broken and shaped into a chair. “You ever been in a motel?” asks the demon again. No. No, anything but this as he continues, “They’re not without their charms, but I would appreciate sheets with a higher thread-count than one.”

You’re not supposed to explain comedy, but when something is this tightly constructed it can be fun to look at the science of it. So one guy made an old joke about walking dogs to another guy, because they’re both watching a lady walk a dog, but the second guy is so dumb he doesn’t even know it’s an old joke. In fact, he gives the first guy money because he’s so sure it’s not an old joke. And that’s just the setup to the punchline of the second guy humorlessly retelling the whole story to promote a movie he’s in which has nothing to do with any of it. I have never regretted an article concept more than this. What am I doing?

No misunderstanding is safe from this scoundrel! This is his attempt at a New York Fashion Week viral tweet, and this is a haunting new development. Mortdecai has gone from regular confusion to an almost supernatural confusion. A normal Cousin Balki response to this would be “Who am I wearing? Her name was Bessie, and she made a great jacket and even better burgers.” But Mortdecai has sidestepped the trope entirely and gone with, “Who am I wearing? How did you know my clothes are people, I don’t have a joke, simply this madness!!” It’s fucking nuts. He’s carelessly creating entirely new realities in which to be wrong.

Can’t wait for tonight’s #TedLasso, but first: is a hot dog a sandwich? Support the troops this International Donut Day. This is so lazy I don’t have a joke. If you were a janitor at Applebee’s this would be like calling in to ask your shift supervisor to tell table ten you tried to kill yourself.

Now this stupid piece of shit coming soon to a theater near me doesn’t understand fruit? But also he does? He knows how to eat an orange and what you call that process. Mortdecai said the fucking words “peel my orange.” So he would rather choke down the bitter rind than suffer the indignity of removing it himself? How is anyone this bad at anything? And I’m not talking about the character. This social media manager had to come up with one thing a rich person can’t do on their own, fucking couldn’t, then went ahead and tweeted it anyway.

This circular stupidity can happen when someone has nothing to say and a contractual obligation to say it anyway. And it seems like real wisdom to them because they’ve spent so long exploring the dumb puzzle of how to wrap up the sentence they started that any ending feels like hard-fought genius. I see this shit a lot in books starting with “1001 Ways,” but it should not have been possible for the corporate account of a movie to run out of things to say about the movie so quickly. Mortdecai made it to zero before he ran out of Mortdecai things to say. But this dumbass fucking tweet gave us my new favorite Mortdecai side character, Carolina:

Carolina is a Johnny Depp superfan who doesn’t seem to know if he speaks French or Spanish, so she replies in both. “I don’t give a shit about this movie, tell the actor in it to make love to me,” Carolina will tell this account every day for the next year. My birthday is June 9th, she will mention every time. I have bitten seven men on the bus for looking like Johnny Depp from behind, she will imply with every message.

Mortdecai is at his best when he’s giving a cold take about a trending topic but pretending to be confused about every detail. This was the day U2 dropped an album, whether you wanted it or not, directly onto your iTunes, and this is an impossibly unfunny thing to say about such an absurd event. This is like Jay Leno telling his audience, “U2 dropped a new album today, you heard about this? I don’t know who they are. I’m not sure what a computer does, we’ve got a great show tonight!” It’s criminal that the Official Mortdecai Twitter Account stopped posting before the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial.

Ha ha how badly are they paying the Mortdecai social media manager that when they tried to conceive of something only the fabulously wealthy could afford they came up with “four extra bicycles.”

Obviously, this is a slam dunk. I have no notes for this perfect tweet liked 74 times by fans of the upcoming film, Mortdecai. What I do want to talk about is Carolina’s response, which makes up 33% of the replies:

Carolina heard “Tweed Season,” made it into “Flowers Season” and made that into “Fuck Season.” This game is called 3 Degrees of Johnny Depp Penetration, and Carolina wins every time. She was born on June 9th, as you know, and now tweets at Johnny Depp in a language he speaks.

Are ghosts real? Probably not, but raccoons might be. I think that’s enough for today.

I got a plant. Couldn’t come up with a funny name or anything; not sure why I brought it up. Okay, sorry for all of this, watch Mortdecai I guess.

You have to write what you know, and the Official Mortdecai Twitter Account can’t fucking do this anymore. Let me skip ahead a bit because the next month is just Mortdecai being wrong about the details of whatever holiday it is. If you broke into a stranger’s home and wrote “What are secretaries? Who is Halloween?” on their calendar, they say “What? Why? I feel like I’m reading Mortdecai’s Twitter feed.” Ah, here’s a fun one:

This is breathtaking. We know the story isn’t true because the storyteller doesn’t exist, so what is this? Who could it be for? He is roasting a hypothetical man and bombing! “We got all dressed up and this guy’s in jeans? I mean he must be fucking blind, right? The kind of blind that doesn’t know what denim feels like, the sightless fuck. You know? Maybe We’re too good to the blind– maybe we should kick them out of the opera if they dress like trash. Garbage blind fuck probably sleeps on sheets with a thread count of one. Anyway, that’s my time. Thank you, good night!” It’s pretty unlikeable even for Mortdecai, but Carolina’s passion is unstoppable.

“Here’s a stock photo of you, make love to me, I was born on June 9th,” she told the social media manager for Johnny Depp’s 61st feature film. Carolina is the best.

Jesus Christ, I had to look this up to be sure. This is an I Dream of Jeannie reference, and stay with me, but Mortdecai mistook the American Air Force captain on this ’60s sitcom for a British naval admiral from the 1700s and then mistook the whole thing for another documentary. It’s stunning. This is a death march to get to the punchline, which once again, is “what’s TV?”

I like this one because it’s dumb in an inspiring way. Until now I didn’t know you could say something so stupid, so worthless. It’s got the tone of a joke, but only enough to let you down. You can’t teach this. A brilliant writer could never disappoint you like this. I feel so blessed we got to see an ad agency crush every last bit of whimsy out of an intern and still force them to do daily Mortdecai tweets for six more months. What other circumstances could create sadness masterpieces like this:

Fucking what, Mortdecai?

This would be such a brutal comeback to an innocent question if this woman existed or had a mustache. Either would help, but both would be better. Here’s my other concern: Mortdecai’s thing is mustaches. He is confused about all words and objects, but he has a mustache. And yet here is someone talking to him about mustaches and he’s still confused. Lionsgate, if Mortdecai isn’t a movie about a man having a 90 minute stroke, you hired the wrong fucking ad agency.

This is beneath my contempt, but you know who loved it? Carolina.

Carolina is begging someone who will never meet Johnny Depp for sex with Johnny Depp in her third language and her wordplay is still stronger than the social media manager for Mortdecai.

Damn, he murdered a slave dressed as an Indian? This is why people say you couldn’t do Mortecai’s Twitter account today.

“I don’t know, I guess he officially eats potpourri,” says some intern about the star of an upcoming $60,000,000 film. Even knowing nothing about the movie, this feels like the official Barbie account tweeting, “My asshole hurts from all the anal, I never understood why we allow Spanish inside.”

Even Carolina told him to shut up after this one.

The person writing this is so stupid they can’t plausibly imagine someone dumber than them. “You know what I hate? When someone’s too dumb for peeling and they have to swallow oranges whole, am I right? And what’s the deal with all this potpourri diarrhea? But seriously, manservants are dressing up like Indians while their masters are turkey hunting, and we all need to come together and help.”

I’m sure I can figure out why someone would tweet this if I think about it hard eno–aaAIIEEEEE! AIiiiIIIEEeeeEEE!!!!!

Okay, so a talking peanut is his limit. Coming soon to theaters, the adventures of a man sure of only one thing: Mr. Peanut is not real. He’s Mortdecai, and that’s his only thing!

From the writer of “I bought five bicycles” comes the new hit tweet, “I bought three sailboats.” And do you know where Mortdecai can sail those boats? Carolina’s house:

They haven’t had a joke land yet, but the Mortdecai social media manager got pretty close to bringing one middle-aged Spanish woman to orgasm. “Sounds like my kinda gig, OH!” Andrew Dice Clay might say.

The movie is coming out in eight days and Mortdecai is literally looking around the room for objects to get confused by.

The movie was almost here! Around this time Mortdecai was taking a break from misunderstanding objects and tweeting mostly about how hot Olivia Munn looked on press junket appearances. And then finally, on the international premiere of the long-awaited film Mortedcai, he said this:

What!? This is your big day, the reason you were given life! And after all these months of preparation you end like you started: burying a limp comedy premise under what looks like a mistake. It’s almost perfect.

“Let me walk you all through the same bad joke a second time,” Mortdecai says. And now it’s perfect.

I feel like I should apologize for this, but the account kept posting so let’s do a few more.

The day after the film’s premiere must be hugely important for its social media accounts. There’s all this new traffic! Reviews! Red carpet photos! But anyone checking out the Mortdecai twitter account saw this. “He collects s-soap?” they must have wondered. I’m so proud to say he might. I have no idea if Mortdecai (2015) is about a man’s quest for a rare decorative soap. I hope it’s not, but I also don’t care. If that’s a movie plot, fuck you. If it’s only a tweet, absolutely fuck you. Either way, Carolina would like you to tell Johnny Depp she is good to go.

His movie is out. The reviews are awful and the box office is disastrous. It’s over, there’s no need for any of this, and he’s still listing objects he can’t figure out. Is coffee turpentine? I better not drink one of them in the garage where Jock lives. You all know Jock! The beloved garage character who watches me drink turpentine!

This is, by far, Mortdecai’s biggest tweet. But the only thing worse than a pathetic twitter account getting no attention is a pathetic twitter account after people find it. Mortdecai got eviscerated in the replies, mostly from people who knew moving the “b” in “Super Bowl” was pretty common in the zany community for over a decade. Mortdecai logged on every day for months in a series of contractually obligated attempts at going viral and the closest he came was the time he copied a joke so common you can’t even point to where he stole it f– wait, this ending is too sad. Let’s go forward in time four days to another dream one:

Haha it’s literally a tweet about a fictional character’s dream and the only commentary is “that’s kind of weird, huh?” No, you fool. You small-thinking coward. Weird is responding to your idiot pickle dream with a picture of Johnny Depp dressed like a vampire and telling him, a person you are not, you’ll wait for him eternally.

Don’t tell Carolina, but this is from the movie The Libertine where Johnny Depp does not play a vampire. It’s nothing compared to the mistake I’ve made! I don’t know why I did this! Any of this! Bye!

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