Dumbest Celebrity Tweets Are a Public Service the PR Industry Will Never Forgive Us For Sharing

Look, the reason this stuff still hits is that you cannot imagine any celebrity today posting any of it. The current model of celebrity Twitter is professionally managed, brand-safe, focus-grouped to within an inch of its life. Nobody is asking questions about ant anatomy. Nobody is announcing premature deaths of living senators. Nobody is sharing accidental medical confessions for an audience of forty million people. The funny celebrity tweets that still float around online are from a specific cultural moment when these people genuinely did not realize what they had access to, and the lack of realization is what made the tweets immortal.

The Jaden Smith content specifically deserves recognition as a kind of accidental philosophy. There was a long stretch where Jaden was producing tweets at the rate of a working poet, asking questions about trees, time, and consciousness that nobody had requested, and the resulting material reads like outsider art now. The hilarious celebrity posts from that era are not, mostly, satire. They are sincere. The sincerity is what makes them land twelve years later.

The Kardashian family contributions are their own particular legacy. Somewhere along the line, the family figured out that they could mine personal life events for engagement, and the early experiments with this strategy involved a level of oversharing that the current PR-managed version of the family would never permit. The dumb celebrity moments from this era are essentially the messy first drafts of a media empire, and the messy first drafts are, unsurprisingly, much funnier than the polished final product.

The bigger thing this all captures is that celebrity used to be a thing you could glimpse through a magazine or a talk show appearance, and the glimpses were carefully constructed. Twitter broke that arrangement, briefly. For about five years, the rest of us could see what these people actually thought about, and what they thought about turned out to be, mostly, the same nonsense the rest of us think about, just with significantly more followers attached.

The cringe celebrity content that survives online is essentially the receipts from that period. The publicists eventually arrived. The accounts got locked down. The personal voice got replaced with brand voice. What we still have is the archived evidence of a moment when fame did not yet come with a media management contract, and the moment, against every PR instinct, was actually the most charming version of celebrity culture we have ever had.

The phones got taken away. The voices got professional. The internet, however, screenshots everything, and the screenshots are forever.