Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul.

April 12, 2023 11:09 AM

Paul Dochney posted his way into the halls of internet lore. After 15 years of anonymity, can he emerge without compromising his act?
posted by Etrigan (62 comments total)

I once quoted the large adult sons dril tweet to my therapist and began to explain who dril was, to which she responded "no, I know about dril." This has led to the running joke that my therapist is dril, and, honestly, I was happy assuming that was true.
posted by pxe2000 at 11:36 AM on April 12, 2023 [55 favorites]

no
posted by mhoye at 11:37 AM on April 12, 2023 [28 favorites]

"IF THE ZOO BANS ME FOR HOLLERING AT THE ANIMALS I WILL FACE GOD AND WALK BACKWARDS INTO HELL" is one of the greatest english sentences ever created. Just an incredible, unique energy brought to bear in service of something absurd. Absolutely on the same level as "you cannot kill me in a way that matters", in my opinion.
posted by mhoye at 11:42 AM on April 12, 2023 [78 favorites]

House of Pies on Franklin is 100% the terrible sort of place Dril would want to meet. The author's subtle dig on how terrible their coffee is was all they had to say to prove they also know it sucks.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 11:42 AM on April 12, 2023

I started reading without looking at the name of the publication, and when I got to the illustrations thought, "wow, New Yorker cartoons are going off the RAILS these days."

Thanks for posting this!
posted by papayaninja at 11:43 AM on April 12, 2023

I'm not a fan, but this profile is more interesting than I expected.
posted by ovvl at 11:52 AM on April 12, 2023

If there’s one accent in the posting language that could be arguably sourced to Dril, it’s the disaffected irony so many of us have adopted online—the way we seem increasingly allergic to earnestness and blanketed in a wisecracking despair.

my dude do you remember the 90s?

If anything, the general mien these days is more earnest than ever, from where I'm sitting. The caring-is-for-losers cloud seems to have largely dispersed. dril's posts, to me, are more dada than disaffected.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:54 AM on April 12, 2023 [84 favorites]

So tell me if I'm exaggerating, but is this like bagging an interview with JD Salinger where he introduces himself as Holden Caulfield?
posted by credulous at 12:00 PM on April 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

Ah well, I guess I’ll have to retire my formula for who’s extremely online. It goes like this:

to a normie being extremely online is using social media
to a social media user being extremely online is using twitter
to a tweeter being extremely online is being on weird twitter
to the extremely online being extremely online is learning dril’s identity and choosing to forget
posted by Kattullus at 12:02 PM on April 12, 2023 [39 favorites]

The way Dochney put it, posting, for him, is “kind of like going to the bathroom, really—just putting something out there.”
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:07 PM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

“Most people are normal,” Dochney explained. “But there’s, like, three or four weirdos who just ruin it for everyone.”

sideeye.gif
posted by backseatpilot at 12:16 PM on April 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

to the extremely online being extremely online is learning dril’s identity and choosing to forget

just try and stop me, buddy
posted by praemunire at 12:17 PM on April 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

For some reason I thought we knew that dril was actually a group of writers who essentially ghost wrote his tweets? To me that made sense considering his consistency and sheer amount of it all. Reading TFA it seems he was doxxed a while back and also has a long time co-creative he works with on a lot of projects so I must have mixed stuff up in my memory. I think I’m a little sad about this because that means the possibility of dril being a perpetual online entity via new ghostwriters is only a thing I made up. But I am glad to know that this guy Paul is continuing to pursue his drive to make funny weird shit as the formats and mechanisms of comedy and communicative absurdity evolve.
posted by Mizu at 12:32 PM on April 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's a sad day. I liked his anonymity; it made his absurdity a bit more profound. Takes away from the magic, maybe.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:50 PM on April 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

For some reason I thought we knew that dril was actually a group of writers who essentially ghost wrote his tweets? To me that made sense considering his consistency and sheer amount of it all.

I think you’re thinking of the Pauline Epistles?

Agree on Dril being more Dada than nihilistic, he reminds me of someone who watched a lot of NBC-era David Letterman.

Also, is House of Pies in LA much worse than the one in Houston? Because I really liked the one there. Though I may just have bad taste.
posted by skewed at 12:54 PM on April 12, 2023 [14 favorites]

I came in to say that I love the Los Feliz House of Pies but I do tend to have a love of a deeply uncool diner vibe lately, I could easily see myself having the opposite feeling about it.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 1:04 PM on April 12, 2023

just try and stop me, buddy

Well, if you insist...

You just lost the game.
posted by flabdablet at 1:09 PM on April 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

From the article:

Before meeting up with Dochney, I wrote down a list of artists and art that I thought he might have some lineage from, and late in our conversation, I began rattling them off to see whether he felt any attachment. I wanted to attempt to understand Dochney within the context of the history of comedy.

Looney Tunes? “I was more of a Ren & Stimpy child,” he said. Kurt Vonnegut? “Pretty good.” Jack Handey? “I really liked that.” A Confederacy of Dunces? “I thought it was funny. I thought it was kind of ahead of its time. … [Ignatius J. Reilly] was, like, the first internet nerd before the internet even existed.” Marcel Duchamp—the, uh, “urinal guy,” I stammered. “I don’t know if I can respect a man who you refer to as ‘the urinal guy,’” he replied.

posted by spamandkimchi at 1:17 PM on April 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

(previously on Metafilter: Give the Nobel Prize in Literature to Dril )
posted by JimBennett at 1:27 PM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hey - no crapping on the House of Pies. It's an LA institution. I know one of their former bakers and she makes a hell of a pie too!
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:28 PM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

If there’s one accent in the posting language that could be arguably sourced to Dril, it’s the disaffected irony so many of us have adopted online—the way we seem increasingly allergic to earnestness and blanketed in a wisecracking despair.

No, I remember the nineties well, and the difference is that at the time we thought there was an outside or a standpoint from which to criticize, partly because there sort of was - it was the last hurrah before every enterprise, way of life, housing rental, job, phonecall, place to hang out, etc was totally subsumed within surveillance, platform services, the algos, etc. The criticism was from a place of "why don't you just drop out, you must be some kind of idiot to engage with this bullshit".

The standpoint now is that we all have no choice but to engage with the bullshit from a position of despair and hollowness. It's like, back in the nineties I didn't know any leftists who watched TV because TV was bullshit garbage propaganda. Now everyone watches TV, fully knowing and accepting that it is bullshit garbage propaganda like everything else.

Things are worse, good god are they worse.

Dril is good.
posted by Frowner at 1:46 PM on April 12, 2023 [58 favorites]

"where the dead walked

"and the living were made of cardboard.""

no.

I don't know what to make of dril and more importantly, no one cares and that is 🔄.

"To communicate and then stop, that is the
law of discourse
To go far and come to an end"

-Pound
posted by clavdivs at 1:52 PM on April 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

darth get no ideas from this
posted by Going To Maine at 2:18 PM on April 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

some of y'all
posted by grobstein at 2:38 PM on April 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I work in the cultural heritage sector and I can’t think of a thing I so often want to say without ever saying it as “Buddy, they won’t even let me fuck the flag.”
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:55 PM on April 12, 2023 [54 favorites]

“We met with this agent from a big [agency]. We were showing him the pitch decks we had put together that we worked hard on,” Estevez-Olsen said. “He was just like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if I can do anything for you. Because it’s almost like you’re saying you’re not comedians, really, you’re not writers—we can’t, like, put you on a sitcom as a writing team.’ I think in that moment, I felt pretty stupid. I felt like an outsider artist, and we’re, like, dragging in our misshapen barrels that we were painting in the backyard and being like, ‘You should put this in a museum.’”

It's hard not to want dril to succeed in turning his shtick into a more conventional success. But at the same time the misshapen barrel-ness of the thing feels like it's part of what is special about it. If you could just hire dril into a writers room, kinda, what would've been the point.
posted by grobstein at 2:58 PM on April 12, 2023 [12 favorites]

The coffee at House of Pies is exactly what a place named House of Pies should offer.

This article was pleasantly nostalgic because I thought dril was dead, not dead-dead, more like there was a book out, the persona retired, and the actual person was out there adding whimsy to the writer's room of a mid-tier Hulu sitcom.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:18 PM on April 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I work in the cultural heritage sector and I can’t think of a thing I so often want to say without ever saying it as “Buddy, they won’t even let me fuck the flag.”
I recently met with the people who literally run the BRH and I could not stop thinking about this tweet.
posted by knile at 3:20 PM on April 12, 2023 [16 favorites]

You know Twitter's in trouble when dril starts looking for a new schtick.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 3:46 PM on April 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

Also, is House of Pies in LA much worse than the one in Houston? Because I really liked the one there. Though I may just have bad taste.

It was founded 55ish years ago by the guy who also built IHOP, and the chain itself went out of business like 40 years ago. The Houston ones and the SoCal ones continued on as their own separate things, and I believe in LA it's just down to the on Franklin.

I will say, back before all the hipsters moved into the area starting after Swingers became a hit, HoP would allow you to shelter from any knife wielding weirdos that might have chased you and your pals down the street after closing out the Dresden Room, so I do thank them for that. Coffee still sucks though.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 3:51 PM on April 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

The “drunk driving kills people but gets me to work on time so it’s impossible to say if it’s good or bad” is worth more than a year of poli sci dissertations.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:01 PM on April 12, 2023 [25 favorites]

dril is one of the all-time MVPs. the Blue Bird is dead, but you can still see (and patronize) dril in an ethical way at their Gumroad.

bad news: were all helpless cogs doomed to ceaselessly perpetuate a machine
good news: the machine is a Sega and were all sonic the hegehog

joke's on you; i actually love being body slammed by one dozen perfect wrestlers. and my mouth isn't filled with bloodm, it's victory wine

im the only guy who knows how to call out the bull shit of society the smart way. and against all odds i do it for free

The Dick Head On Team Chat Whose Smoke Detector Needs A New Battery: Does any one in here know how to fedex a pit bull

Oops! another $50000 worth of nft ape shit got stolen from me some how. Weird!!! good thing i still have all 200 of my iq points
posted by duende at 4:02 PM on April 12, 2023 [11 favorites]

One of my favourite recent tweets wasn’t by dril but showed how his style has become a part of the culture:

"for all you assholes out there: i have fallen off the roof" is perfect dril
posted by good in a vacuum at 4:20 PM on April 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

Didn't this happen once before and the internet collectively decided not to care and to just completely forget about his secret identity
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:21 PM on April 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

Confession: Every time I see their name I read it as Doctor Ill and consciously correct myself, literally every single time
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 4:37 PM on April 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

It had literally not occurred to me to think of @dril as an actual persona or character with a Twitter account, as opposed to someone who just posts bizarre but otherwise unconnected joke tweets with an astonishingly high hit rate, until this article.
posted by chrominance at 4:39 PM on April 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Didn't this happen once before and the internet collectively decided not to care and to just completely forget about his secret identity

Last time he got doxxed (or at least, the identity was revealed without his consent). This time, he's talking about being dril, basically.
posted by dismas at 5:41 PM on April 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

dril, if I remember the story right, is one of the last vestiges of the ascendancy of Something Awful, who managed to transcend the culture of the original site. To remind you, that culture also ultimately gave us 4chan, so, not an unalloyed good.

dril's fine, but a part of me wonders if there aren't a thousand drils that you never see, because Twitter's algorithms don't prioritize them, and dril benefits greatly from being found from one of the last big forum site outsides of Twitter and that giving him kind of a first-mover status, his fame perpetuating itself in a way that's unavailable to other people now. Discoverability is super terrible on Twitter itself, if you use the algorithmic timeline you're put at the mercy of their algorithm rules, which includes such bullshit as penalizing your tweets if, say, you follow more people than follow you, or you post "out of band" too often, outside of the pigeonhole that Twitter has decided you live in; if you use the chronological timeline, who you see is mostly random above a very small number of follows a day.

Turning internet fame into other kinds of fame is not a foregone conclusion. Chris Onstad never managed to get an Achewood TV show off the ground. The Brothers Chaps got a nice gig for awhile writing for shows like Aquabats (Strong Bad basically guest stars in one episode!) and then general Disney cartoons, but few people seem to realize that they're doing that. Neil Cicierega is great at doing what he does, but other than some songs on Gravity Falls he's still an internet culture person, where if you don't keep making new stuff constantly people rapidly forget about you.
posted by JHarris at 5:53 PM on April 12, 2023 [11 favorites]

it's as if his tweets sound like the unexpected answer from the corner of a room.
posted by clavdivs at 7:30 PM on April 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

When Elon bought Twitter, I downloaded all of Dril's tweets before my own.
posted by credulous at 7:33 PM on April 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

The standpoint now is that we all have no choice but to engage with the bullshit from a position of despair and hollowness. It's like, back in the nineties I didn't know any leftists who watched TV because TV was bullshit garbage propaganda. Now everyone watches TV, fully knowing and accepting that it is bullshit garbage propaganda like everything else.

Frowner, this elicited a visceral reaction from me. I couldn't agree more.
posted by doctor_negative at 8:00 PM on April 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

I started to read this last night, and I stopped. I don’t particularly want to know who dril is, and finding out he’s just some guy who grew up in something awful, I mean, great. Sure, whatever.

The great and powerful Oz was impressive and terrifying. The guy behind the curtain was, and always will be, a schmoe who can’t help but fail to live up to the image he created.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:42 PM on April 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

… what if god was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make his way home?

WHAT THEN
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 9:00 PM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

dril foam and the gold standards
posted by clavdivs at 9:30 PM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

dril's fine, but a part of me wonders if there aren't a thousand drils that you never see, because Twitter's algorithms don't prioritize them, and dril benefits greatly from being found from one of the last big forum site outsides of Twitter and that giving him kind of a first-mover status, his fame perpetuating itself in a way that's unavailable to other people now.

Yeah, people are probably less likely to click follow on an account when they see a funny tweet go viral now, too. And like, the article says dril is 35, so he was kind of right in the group of very online millennials who defined a lot of Twitter. But would a 20 year old with his talents today even try to build a persona on Twitter?

A lot of the other early “Weird Twitter” accounts have shut down. The article mentions @horse_ebooks. Now I’m nostalgic for @petfurniture.

But it’s how these things go. There were 1000 almost Bill Hicks comedians in the 90s and 1000 almost Mitch Hedbergs in the 2000s. Bands who were almost the next Moldy Peaches in the college dorm network iTunes sharing era are probably buying their kids 100 Gecs merch off Bandcamp right now.
posted by smelendez at 11:46 PM on April 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

But it’s how these things go. There were 1000 almost Bill Hicks comedians in the 90s and 1000 almost Mitch Hedbergs in the 2000s. Bands who were almost the next Moldy Peaches in the college dorm network iTunes sharing era are probably buying their kids 100 Gecs merch off Bandcamp right now.

I love and hate how many of those references I know due to age. The last of which I only know because of Metafilter.
posted by revmitcz at 12:02 AM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's like, back in the nineties I didn't know any leftists who watched TV because TV was bullshit garbage propaganda. Now everyone watches TV, fully knowing and accepting that it is bullshit garbage propaganda like everything else.

When I watch TV I still wear an N95.
posted by flabdablet at 2:29 AM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I mean, I hope Paul can find some more permanent way to get paid for his absolutely incredible phrasing. It's super difficult for internet people to get Paid - the comedian I think of who managed it is Bo Burnham, and I think he managed it because he also worked his ass off.
posted by Merus at 4:53 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

twitter did not have an "algorithim" for many years - it was a site driven by the people you follow, and their retweets. in that context, Dril's rise was organic. there are definitely 1000 Drils - there were dozens and dozens of thinkpeices about "Weird Twitter"after all - but none of them are as funny as Dril himself.

The standpoint now is that we all have no choice but to engage with the bullshit from a position of despair and hollowness. It's like, back in the nineties I didn't know any leftists who watched TV because TV was bullshit garbage propaganda. Now everyone watches TV, fully knowing and accepting that it is bullshit garbage propaganda like everything else.

this is a weird take to me that has basically 0% to do with Dril. we don't need to valorize Gen X disaffection - it did not make the world a better place. people watch TV now because boycotting TV is not actually a political project, it's an aesthetic choice.
posted by JimBennett at 6:29 AM on April 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

Whenever I come across a dril tweet, it always reminds me to go check Jenny Holzer, Mom

https://twitter.com/JennyHolzerMom
posted by chasles at 7:24 AM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Turning internet fame into other kinds of fame is not a foregone conclusion. Chris Onstad never managed to get an Achewood TV show off the ground. The Brothers Chaps got a nice gig for awhile writing for shows like Aquabats (Strong Bad basically guest stars in one episode!) and then general Disney cartoons, but few people seem to realize that they're doing that. Neil Cicierega is great at doing what he does, but other than some songs on Gravity Falls he's still an internet culture person, where if you don't keep making new stuff constantly people rapidly forget about you.

This is a great set of examples. I'll also throw in the Old Man Murray kids, who ended up writing Portal. I don't know how many people know they started out writing semi-disreputable game reviews and hanging out on PoE.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:55 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

"to the extremely online being extremely online is learning dril’s identity and choosing to forget"

And this is where I get to put my sieve-like memory to good use.
posted by MrJM at 10:46 AM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

I loved the comparison to Ignatius J Reilly! Never thought of that but definitely a similar voice to a lot of un-self-aware posting today.
posted by macrael at 10:52 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'll also throw in the Old Man Murray kids, who ended up writing Portal. I don't know how many people know they started out writing semi-disreputable game reviews and hanging out on PoE.

Oh, I would also add Sean Reiley aka "Seanbaby", who continues writing and making comedy to this day. I'm a little surprised he never climbed higher as a writer of comedy, I can recall times when I literally fell out of a chair laughing at some of his articles. Add to that list a lot of the writing staff from the 2005-2017 era of Cracked, who are (mostly) still in the business but without a lot to show for it. By comparison, the Broken Lizard comedy troupe came up a few years earlier than those folks, and most of them have some established comedy acting roles with Jay Chandrasekhar being a big(ish)-director.

One exception, I suppose, would be Jason Pargin (f/k/a David Wong), who was the creator of PointlessWasteOfTime.com and later editor-in-chief at Cracked, who is now a published author, writer of the John Dies At the End series and also the Zoey Ashe series.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:54 AM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

he reminds me of someone who watched a lot of NBC-era David Letterman.

That's an astute observation and probably explains why I love Dril so much.
posted by dweingart at 12:16 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

He also has a touch Michael O'Donoghue, not the full blown tetrarch hate but shades of his brevity and minor gloom blooms.
posted by clavdivs at 1:34 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Turning internet fame into other kinds of fame is not a foregone conclusion. Chris Onstad never managed to get an Achewood TV show off the ground. The Brothers Chaps got a nice gig for awhile writing for shows like Aquabats (Strong Bad basically guest stars in one episode!) and then general Disney cartoons, but few people seem to realize that they're doing that. Neil Cicierega is great at doing what he does, but other than some songs on Gravity Falls he's still an internet culture person, where if you don't keep making new stuff constantly people rapidly forget about you.

What's Brad Neely up to, I wonder? I don't actually want to check, though. Wizard People Dear Reader is a historic achievement and I don't want it sullied.
posted by that's candlepin at 1:35 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

why am I associating his handle with 'well, actually etc etc ' and the rest of that mess from 2014?
posted by infini at 3:13 PM on April 13, 2023

also, a twitter rerun of the great kottke world trip?
posted by infini at 3:14 PM on April 13, 2023

Brad Neely did a number of other things, like Baby Cakes and Professor Brothers, which culminated in the Adult Swim show China, IL. He's not done many internet things lately that I'm aware of.
posted by JHarris at 3:56 PM on April 13, 2023

He tweeted at the beginning of the year saying he's got a novel coming out next year, and is beginning work on a new show.
posted by rifflesby at 10:23 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ah, nice! I hope it goes well for him! Neely's Wikipedia page mentions a Civil War novel that he's put down for not being funny, then picked back up again. Maybe it's that?
posted by JHarris at 11:52 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]