We thought tweets were only for twits like the “Hemingway of Twitter” who currently resides in the White House. Riane Konc, the bright young humor writer seen here who introduced John Steinbeck to the world of social media with great success, has made us think again. In a February 16, 2018 interview about the popularity of her comic blog posts and social-satire tweets, she explained: “To be extremely specific, I think I am at my top functioning when writing a 600-800-word piece where the central joke is something about John Steinbeck. I have, so far, tricked three entire publications into publishing my Steinbeck jokes, which feels way too high.” “Excerpts from Steinbeck’s Novel About the Drought of 2013-2017,” Konc’s pitch-perfect parody of The Grapes of Wrath, appeared at NewYorker.com in July, followed by “A Mommy Message Board Dissects the Ending of The Grapes of Wrath,” a send-up of faux social media communities, at PasteMagazine.com. “Season’s Greetings from the Steinbeck Family!”—Konc’s Christmas Letter from Steinbeck Land (“It has been another dry and brutal year in the Salinas Valley”)—was published in December and reposted at Reddit, where it attracted a thread of clever responses from literate fans (“Our youngest, John Jr., is an exceptional student and was given responsibility for the class pet, a turtle. We were not surprised when it died, for the crops were bad that year.”) A former English teacher who admits that “Twitter has indisputably lowered my quality of living,” Konc says she was gratified nonetheless when “thousands of people on Twitter decided that they were going to riff on a William Carlos Williams poem for several weeks.” Great. But Donald Trump is still riffing, too.
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Sad to see John Steinbeck made fun of. I have appreciated his humor, but I don’t think he is joke. He has given us so much and taken risks for people in difficult situations. He though could also be an entertainer and some of his books are funny and heartwarming. That turtle was also symbolic of creatures, some like ourselves, for whom the world was changing too fast technologically. I think it is balanced and fair to say that Steinbeck could have a sense of humor, like some of his characters, even if they were in a tough place. Iconoclasts need remember that he was picking his laughs.