2012 · The Poke
100 Funniest People on Twitter 2012
Chris / @ChribHibble was included in The Poke's 2012 list of the 100 Funniest People on Twitter.
01 —The shorter version
I'm Chris.
I'm Chris Hibbert. I'm a writer, although that's still a sentence I occasionally feel the need to qualify.
For most of my adult life, writing was something I did around the edges of everything else. Jokes. Facebook posts. Things I noticed and couldn't resist pointing out.
Then, somewhere along the way, it became something rather more important.
I write mostly about people. Family. Fatherhood. Friendship. Football. Pubs. Work. Grief. The strange things we inherit and the even stranger things we do with them.
Usually there's a joke somewhere.
Sometimes there really fucking isn't.
02 —How it started
Making people laugh came first.
Long before I thought of myself as somebody who wrote, I liked making people laugh.
That probably started in the usual places: school, pubs, work, friendships, family. Learning that if you could find the funny thing quickly enough, you could change the temperature of a room.
Eventually I started doing the same thing in writing.
For years, most of what I wrote lived online. Facebook posts, Twitter, observations, stories and stupid jokes about whatever happened to be directly in front of me.
Some people seemed to enjoy them.
I enjoyed that they enjoyed them.
Neither of us needed to make it any more complicated than that.
“I've always been more comfortable making people laugh than explaining why I wanted them to.”
03 —The Twitter years
Years of getting to the point.
For a while, Twitter became a fairly significant part of my life.
I was working from home before working from home was particularly normal, spending an awful lot of time on my own in a spare room. Twitter gave me people to talk to.
I wrote as @ChribHibble. Mostly jokes, observations and whatever stupid thing had occurred to me in the previous thirty seconds.
Some of them travelled.
In 2012, The Poke included me in its list of the 100 Funniest People on Twitter, alongside people who actually did comedy for a living.
Which was obviously ridiculous, but I wasn't going to argue.
There were other mentions, features and jokes picked up elsewhere over the years, and the audience grew.
I loved it.
I loved the people, the jokes and the strange little community that formed around them.
I also became increasingly good at measuring whether something was worth saying by how many strangers pressed a little button underneath it.
It started as a community and became a bit of a massage parlour for my ego.
Eventually, I deleted the app.
I don't miss chasing the numbers.
I do miss some of the people.
“Lots and lots of lovely little pellets of validation.”
04 —Life, then and now
Life kept happening.
The writing carried on around everything else.
I got married. Became a dad three times. Built a business. Coached football. Cooked for people. Lost my dad. Made friends. Lost touch with people. Made mistakes. Drank far too much. Stopped drinking.
Eventually the business disappeared too.
For a long time, writing was something I squeezed into whatever gaps life left behind.
Then life created one enormous fucking gap.
Writing moved into it.
“Turns out I wasn't just dicking about because I was bored after all.”
05 —Breadcrumbs
Why I wrote it.
Breadcrumbs began with a question:
“What happened to the happy little boy?”
I thought I knew roughly where the answer would take me.
I didn't.
Writing it meant going back through childhood, family, my dad's alcoholism, abuse, marriage, fatherhood, depression, work, friendship, grief, my own drinking and eventually sobriety.
Somewhere in all of that, I started noticing the connections between things I'd spent years treating as completely separate.
Hence the title.
I don't think the past explains everything about us, and I certainly don't think it excuses everything we do.
But it leaves things behind.
Sometimes you just have to follow the fucking breadcrumbs.
06 —What comes next
What I want to write about next.
More things that are true.
Not necessarily another memoir, and certainly not an attempt to spend the rest of my life excavating myself for content.
I'm interested in ordinary people carrying things you can't immediately see. Families. Men and friendship. Fatherhood. Masculinity. Pubs and football clubs and kitchens and all the other places where people accidentally tell you who they are.
Probably funny.
Occasionally not funny at all.
Ideally both.
“The interesting stuff is usually happening underneath.”
07 —Before the book
Before the book.
Long before a manuscript existed, there were years of writing in public — sometimes a story, sometimes a joke, sometimes just something that amused me enough to press Publish.
Some of it travelled rather further than I expected.
Reader's Digest
Tweet featured
A tweet featured by Reader's Digest.
The Telegraph
List of accounts to follow on Twitter
Included in a Telegraph list of accounts to follow on Twitter.
The Poke
Regular inclusion in humour lists
Work appearing regularly in The Poke's humour round-ups.
The Telegraph
100 Greatest Tweets of All Time
Included in The Telegraph's 100 Greatest Tweets of All Time.
Mirror
Work featured
Tweets featured by the Mirror.
Kia
Commissioned copy, Rio launch
Wrote tweets for Kia around the launch of the new Rio.
The Anchor Inn
@The_Anchor_Inn
Another place the writing escaped to.
A separate account for the pub I practically grew up in — a place tied to family, friendship, my dad and a significant amount of my life.
08 —On the bedside table
Books I wish I'd written.
Not because they're necessarily like Breadcrumbs. Mostly because they made me laugh, think, feel something, or become mildly irritated that somebody else had already written them.
- And Away...Bob Mortimer
- A Heart That WorksRob Delaney
- Ramble BookAdam Buxton
- What's That Lady Doing?Lou Sanders
- ChaptersTim Key
09 —Contact
Still here?
That's probably enough about me.
If you'd like to talk about the book, the writing, publishing, press or something else that seems vaguely relevant, you can get in touch.