The voice behind The Tweet of God is David Javerbaum, a multi Emmy-winning American comedy writer from Los Angeles. He created the account in 2010 to promote his book, The Last Testament: A Memoir By God. Ironically, many people thought the book was actually a spin-off of the account since the latter took off so quickly.
Later on, he adapted both the book and the Twitter account into a play, An Act of God, which was performed on Broadway for two summers and then all over the world.
Javerbaum is always playing his part, saying that he’s in fact working with and for God as a social media manager. He explained why the account is only interested in one person, Justin Bieber: “From what God told me, he only follows close family members. That’s all I could get out of him.”
If you’re trying to reach the comedy writer and have a little chat with The Almighty, don’t expect too much. He Himself posts a lot and sometimes even re-tweets with a snappy comment but does not participate much in conversations. “God replies to tweets exactly as often as he replies to prayers from other people,” Javerbaum said.
Even though The Tweet of God has many followers and is viewed as “the universe’s most popular unverified Twitter account”, it also went through some bad times. The account got hacked several years ago, which made Javerbaum quit for a year and a half.
Also, Twitter suspended the account twice. One time, he used their blue badge in the background picture without their permission. “And that was just a purely legalistic suspension,” the founder of the account told The Last Laugh. “I was trying to imply that I was verified.”
The second time was in June 2019. “If gay people are a mistake, they’re a mistake I’ve made hundreds of millions of times, which proves I’m incompetent and shouldn’t be relied upon for anything,” the tweet stated. Twitter mistakenly thought of it as anti-gay. “So they got that one wrong and they realized it and I got back on,” the writer explained. “I let them know that their sense of irony had some deficiencies that ought to be corrected.”
Last year, the founder went one step further and created a podcast called Godcast. “Well, I think of it as adapting a character. God is a character that I know very well. And he’s not any bigger of a character than any other character would be. He just happens to be God. But he’s, in many ways, just the cranky old man on the lawn of the universe. And I always thought that a podcast was the ideal form, more so even than Twitter, because it’s the voice of God.”
So it seems that David Javerbaum is fully engaged with this all-powerful character. Right now, he’s busy with publishing his response to King David’s The Book of Psalms titled The Book of Pslams: 97 Divine Diatribes on Humanity’s Total Failure.
At the same time, the account is still going strong and continuing to entertain its followers with piercingly sharp humor. “The only time there would be no material for satire will be in a perfect world. And I don’t see that coming any time soon. I do think that if it were a perfect world, my [in]ability to make fun of it would be a small price to pay,” David Javerbaum said.
