Creative Exercise

If you're Ashton Kutcher, there's no chance you're ever going to post the most brilliant thing you've ever thought of on Twitter.

Last week, one of Ashton's Tweets was: "We did it! We won the who wore purple best campaign You guys are amazing! Thank you."

I'm sure Ashton Kutcher is very nice, which must be why he has 3 million Twitter followers. But first of all, what the hell does that mean? Second of all, really? This is the most highly trafficked pinnacle of conscious thought in America? Ugh. It's over. It's just over. America is over.

On the other hand, if you're a comedian or a writer, Twitter and Facebook do pose a problem -- if you come up with a good line, do you:

A) Post it on Facebook or Twitter?

B) Save it for your stand-up or your day-writing job?

C) Or save it for a book or screenplay?

I face that problem every day. I don't want to post a good line on Facebook and then regurgitate it in a column. The column comes first. You know why? Money.

So to find an expert on the Twitter-creative question, I got on the phone with Dane Cook -- who does stand-up at the Hard Rock Hotel today and Saturday -- because he practically invented the whole process of communicating with every single fan online. That helped propel him commercially.

And now he's got this choice to make every day. He's got 1.3 million Twitter followers. Does he give them his best lines? Or does he save his best for the stage?

"I've written things and I haven't posted them," he says.

"I'll go, 'You know what? I may never do this as a stand-up thing, but this may be a line for my book someday.'

"I don't push that send button or the update button that quickly. I give myself a few minutes to think: How is this in the big picture? How does this entertain or inform?"

Cook doesn't think it's always good when creative thoughts get updated so instantly.

"Some things should be grown. I Twitter stuff that's very random, that I'd never say onstage, that wouldn't work in an act."

In fact, when he performs in clubs, he doesn't like seeing fans recording his routines, because a lot of times, his jokes are works in progress. If fans then instantly post the jokes on YouTube, it undercuts them, and Cook might as well have Twittered them in their rough-draft versions.

"I want to work on a joke for five, six, seven months, and bat it around, without it being judged and handled and passed around," Cook says.

Cook has noticed that his Twitter posts, written in that cramped space of 140-characters, don't read like traditional jokes, or personal thoughts, or professional statements.

They're "some weird hybrid" of the personal, the professional and some other intangible thing, he says.

He thinks of his Twitter life like this ramble:

"I can have an opinion, but it's still funny, and I wouldn't talk about this onstage, but there's still a place for me to air out these random nuggets that are knocking around my brain."

OK, but if creative writers don't post their best lines online, then what's the use of Twitter to their followers?

"It's just a great source to get a peek behind the scenes with some of your favorite artists and entertainers and novelists," Cook says.

Cook wishes, when he was a kid, he could have gone to a place like Twitter to find out what was on the minds of Steve Martin, Steven Wright and Bill Cosby.

"I would have eaten that up," he says. "You waited for a book. Now you wait for your favorite performer to Tweet something."

And for the artist -- the comedian, musician or writer -- Twitter is a good place to exercise the creative side of your brain, he says.

I suppose I can buy those arguments. But it would be nice if Twitter and Facebook paid us all little commissions, with their mountains of fortunes built on our backs. Maybe I'd care more about them if they cut me a check, the greedy bastards.

Doug Elfman's column appears Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. E-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.