In post memoriam

It’s frigid in Massachusetts this morning. When I woke up early to assess the damage from some trees downed by the brutal winds overnight, I saw my neighbor carrying a big box out to their car. She said hello and then immediately ate shit on the icy sidewalk lol. After checking to make sure they weren’t seriously hurt, a certain phrase popped into my mind, as it has many dozens of times over the years.

“Check this shit out motherfucker…”

After that I went inside and read that Mike Fossey had died a few days before Christmas and a couple weeks after his 35th birthday. 

I cried for a minute or two and then started laughing. It’s such a strange feeling finding out someone is gone then spending the next couple of hours howling at their old posts. 

There aren’t many people who that could apply to but Fossey was indeed one of them. You’ll find hundreds or thousands of others writing something to that effect on Twitter or Bluesky right now. Mike F – who grew up just down the street from me here in Concord, MA – was without hyperbole one of the funniest people I, or most of us, ever knew, whether it was in real life or simply through his iconic Superman-avatar online persona. He was one of the best to ever do it, many are saying.

“His posts brought me much joy over the years,” the journalist Mike Isaac wrote when I shared the news of his passing. "’its not clear what move i was trying to do’ has rattled in my head for a decade.” 

“Mike was one of the guys laying the framework for what good jokes would look like in a novel format with a strict character limit,” John Darnielle said. 

It’s hard to write about joke posts and the people who make them without coming off as overly serious or spoiling the whole point— as a lot of people learned writing about “Weird Twitter” back in its heyday—but Fossey was a luminary in the golden age of Twitter in the 2010s, up there alongside the likes of Dril and others, that we got to watch invent the form in real time. 

The thing about a sense of humor is that it is learned and shared. 

Sometimes part of the appeal is how many people remain unable to pick up on the joke. Probably his most famous post was this one about a hot dog. The kind of tweet that was shared widely all over, to the delight or anger of many. 

This is a load-bearing feminist post, someone commented earlier.

This one, too. 

Fossey was never as overtly political as a lot of his peers (and most of us everywhere) have become online. But a clear political sensibility was there, underneath the silliness. 

But more than that, there was the poetic manipulation of language. The way someone like, say, Tim Robinson, speaks a phrase weird and it overwrites how you think about it forever. This is one of those for me:

Insanely surpassed. A phrase I don’t think anyone had ever uttered before but now it’s locked in our heads forever. 

I don’t know that I’ve had an Arnold Palmer in many years either without thinking about this one:

Or seen a news story about a drug bust without remembering this:

“It feels kind of wrong, like to the point of feeling embarrassing, to talk about Posting as a writing form, but it really is a type of writing, and the shape and style of a joke-post is its own thing,” Flaming Hydra David Roth said. 

“Mike Fossey's posts were so obviously on point in that regard. They're funny, of course, but the economy of how he wrote—creating a little scene, establishing characters in it, using a few details to shade it and make it funnier—was real writing. That wasn't the point, I sense, I think the point was to be funny, and he was funny. But he was also legitimately a master of this weird type of writing. You don't have any room to spare with the character count and all that, and he didn't waste anything. He was one of the greats at doing whatever this is.”

“After spending so much of my life ‘online’ it can be easy to ask ‘what’s the point?’” comedian Mike Ginn, a friend of Fossey’s, who called him “my windmill slam pick for the funniest poster of all-time,” told me. 

“I think the point is you get to make friends like Mike F. To connect with people across the country or world who you resonate with on some deep personal frequency. He’s hilarious, wonderful, and I’ll miss him forever.”

You could call him a jokes craftsman, and that would be accurate, but he was also a regular craftsman as well. A woodworker and artisan and in recent years a signmaker around the Boston area for some big projects, not to mention a fine photographer, as you can see on his Instagram.

I just went to look and noticed this at the top, which punched me in the gut.

Rest in peace too to Kaleb Horton. Another great and funny writer and poster we lost way too young. I am so sick of writing eulogies this year.

Aside from the gags he would often share images of the cabinets and tables and such he was working on, both for his job and for his family and friends. As much as I might regularly read his jokes and think I wish I could be that funny, it was truly admirable that he also had this real world talent as well. Something tangible to go along with the ineffable. 

I wasn’t super close with Mike. We were buddies online in the way that people are, although I got the chance to meet him a couple times. I remember the first, maybe eight or so years ago, meeting up at a concert in Harvard Square. He was sweet and funny in person, too, and we walked around the corner to smoke a joint. I remember being sincerely kind of nervous about it, worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up. That I wasn’t going to be funny enough. Like I was hanging out with a beloved famous comedian or something. Which is what he was, in fact. 

Sadly, like many of the best, a number of Fossey’s original Twitter accounts were suspended over the years and have since been mostly lost to time. Luckily a lot of people have kept screenshots of some of their favorites saved elsewhere. Here are a few of the best. 

More year-end thoughts from Luke O’Neil:
The best of Hell World 2025

The best 50ish songs of 2025