30 Chucklesome Twitter Posts Turned Into Comedy Gems By Removing Letters, Shared In This Dedicated Online Group

The original Reddit post happened in 2018, the 24th of March, on me_irl, a subreddit meant for posting “selfies of the soul,” things that represent you innately. After all this time, the post has collected almost 21 thousand upvotes and 200 comments. 

At first, people didn’t understand what it was, laughing at the poetic absurdity of the Tweet and hoping that it would take off, with people making more of them. Little did they know…

The statement that resonated with folks the most after seeing the original “Pelican” was: “Finally, a president who's not afraid to say what we're all thinking.” Others questioned reality and wondered how people come up with things like these, wondering that it could be a different form of Haiku. 

A mere day later, the community was formed on March 25th. Currently, there are 41 thousand people there, all getting Pelicanized memes in their feeds.

This may surprise you, but people have been making Pelicanized memes for far longer than you may be willing to believe. This is actually an art form called erasure or blackout poetry. 

Words are deleted, cut, or blotted out from any kind of previous text, be it a newspaper, a poetry book, or, in this case, a Tweet. It changes the original meaning but retains some authorship, drawing attention to new themes.

One of the earliest known adopters of this technique was Doris Cross, particularly known for her works with dictionaries. Using them, she could make astounding works of art by deleting parts of text and creating intricate drawings over them.

Blackout poetry may be used as a form of self-expression or a form of critique of political suppression and secrecy. Most importantly, like any great form of art, it is versatile and deeper than it may seem at first glance.

Now that we know a bit more about what the formal name for “Pelicanizing” is, we can take a look at other similar communities. Again on Reddit, SpeedOfLobsters has the same basic concept of using blackout poetry to create humorous images, but they no longer limit themselves to Tweets. There is also ExpandDong, a community that adds letters to things in a ransom note fashion, leading to humorous but explicit results.

Finally, an honorable mention should be made to Sbubby, a community for editing various logos in ways that look the same but say something different. I don’t think I can't put this linguistic game into words, so you’re best off just looking at it yourself.