‘That open tweet is the canvas’: behind the highs, lows and memes of Black Twitter

A new docuseries, from Insecure showrunner Prentice Penny, explores how a section of Twitter became an inventive and impactful community

How to explain Black Twitter? It's less of an actual place than a general practice, sometimes a secret society and then sometimes a prominent advocacy bloc, neither a standalone digital platform nor its own hashtag per se. Yet when cops kill, Kendrick Lamar drops or Harlem shakes, we know Black Twitter when we see it.

In the almost 20 years that Twitter (or X now, if we must) has been a thing, Black Twitter has been the mystical life force that has kept it real, riveting and rich. But where does one even start, much less catalog a seemingly endless stream of killer punchlines? I remember when the Alabama brawl stuff came out and there were a lot of jokes about Terrence Howard and the way he says mayne' in Hustle and Flow," says the comedy guru Prentice Penny. And then somebody calls the [teen who dived off a riverboat to join the fight] Aquamayne. Just using the kid coming out of the water as a set-up to call back to mayne is hilarious. Like, I just wanna keep being this funny."