Twitter has been featured in movies, but Laurie McGuinness’ Funny Tweets is allegedly the first film about Twitter, an open forum that allows users to connect to the world through condensed text.  The film reminds its viewers that it’s “not affiliated with or sponsored by” the social media platform but, hey, they could’ve fooled me.  The documentary is overflowing with gratitude expressed by comedians and writers who sing the Twittersphere gospel.

Despite their gloating, McGuinness has, in fact, interviewed the right people for her documentary.  These are all very funny people who have either found their fame online, or can retrospectively talk about how they feel about the modern recruitment of comedians being hired based on their social media presence.  They have a lot to talk about, including other topics pertaining to ill-timed jokes and plagiarism.  After watching the doc, movie goers will want to follow every single one of these people.  However, McGuinness and his editors struggle to find cohesiveness in these interviews.  There’s a running success story about Dan Duvall, a Canadian cash supervisor-turn-TV writer who spun his sense of humour into gold, but most of the time, Funny Tweets just wants to shoot the breeze and show you amusing blurbs the filmmakers found on Twitter.  It’s entertaining, but this collection of thin story threads hardly amounts to much, let alone qualifies it for a feature-length treatment.

However, considering how spirited its animated sequences are, Funny Tweets would’ve killed as a series of video essays.

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Addison Wylie: @AddisonWylie