Kanye West Joins Twitter

In the day since Kanye West joined Twitter, he’s already become arguably the site’s single funniest user. I’m not even kidding.

Take the update he posted earlier this afternoon, just one of dozens so far: “I think Twitter was designed specifically with me in mind just my humble opinion hahhhahaaaahaaa humble hahahahhahaahaaaa.” Exactly. His context-free one-liners are Twitter at its best.

Kanye’s most fascinating tweets document the expensive objects around him. He spent a decent stretch of yesterday afternoon cracking wise about an allegedly tiny jet. Today he’s been posting photos of various regal housewares with deadpan captions. “I hate half empty water bottles so I copped these #goblets to drink out of.” “I copped this to eat cereal out of turning the crib real Kingish.” “I’m just saying… what’s your credenza game…#DON’TTALKTOME!!!” My favorite of this subgenre of Kanye tweets is the one pictured at the top of this post. “I specifically ordered persian rugs with cherub imagery!!! What do I have to do to get a simple persian rug with cherub imagery uuuuugh.”

Did he even buy any of that stuff, or is it part of the joke? Does it matter? He’s playing with the audience’s perception of him as a wealthy egomaniac while simultaneously being just that. Bragging about himself and satirizing himself, at the same time, all the time, like some sort of Schröedinger’s Rapper. When his pal Aziz Ansari started a gently mocking “#PredictingKanyeTweets” hashtag, Kanye just…retweeted him. You can’t laugh at him for being narcissistic, because he’s already right there laughing at himself. I think.

That’s only one side of what Kanye has done on Twitter to date. He’s also shouted out tons of blogs (including the Music Mix) for covering him, marveled at his follower count (255,000 and counting), and riffed on classical music (“Leonard Bernstein is the s—!!!”) and dating supermodels (“I had to learn to like small dogs and cigarettes”). It adds up to our most direct route yet to what Kanye’s thinking as he’s thinking it — like his blog at its caps-lock-ranting height, but even less filtered and a lot more light-hearted. Maybe this is something like what the show Kanye was developing with Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s Larry Charles would have been like if HBO hadn’t passed.

What do you think of Kanye West’s tweets so far? Several sites have attempted to round up his best messages, but really, you should just go follow him now and read ‘em all. There’s no telling what he’ll say next.