NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Herald NOW
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
  • Herald NOW
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Politics
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Herald NOW
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / Entertainment

Twitter star banking on sly wit

Observer
17 May, 2013 09:34 PM7 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

Kelly Oxford had nothing more than an average high-school education and not much ambition before her witty tweets swept her to celebrity status. Photo / Supplied
Kelly Oxford had nothing more than an average high-school education and not much ambition before her witty tweets swept her to celebrity status. Photo / Supplied

Kelly Oxford had nothing more than an average high-school education and not much ambition before her witty tweets swept her to celebrity status. Photo / Supplied

Thanks to her gift for 140-character witticisms, Kelly Oxford (@kellyoxford) has transformed herself from Canadian stay-at-home mum to Los Angeles-based bestselling author and screenwriter. Hermione Hoby meets the woman all the celebrities follow.

"If you can name five Kardashians but can't name five countries in Asia, stick a knife in an electrical socket."

That piece of counsel, Kelly Oxford's most successful tweet of all time, is the kind of one-liner that gets you 10,000 retweets and counting. It's also the sort of material that takes a woman from stay-at-home Canadian mother to bestselling author, Hollywood screenwriter and, of course, Twitter celebrity.

Oxford had no connections to the entertainment industry, no knowledge of the workings of Hollywood and nothing more than an average high-school education.

She didn't, by her own admission, even have much ambition. What she did have was a voice, and it was distinct, honest and funny enough to draw famous fans from the moment she started tweeting.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Oxford's status has just been sealed with a first book: what could be more solid proof of "having arrived" than a New York Times bestseller.

Everything is Perfect When You're a Liar is a collection of scattershot essays, written with the UPPERCASE EXTROVERSION of a teenage girl who's drunk three too many Bacardi Breezers. The book also contains precise stipulations for her funeral. My favourite: that Ryan Gosling and George Clooney should dance her corpse into the room "like Bernie in Weekend at Bernie's".

But the most delicious chapter is titled "Finding Leo", a Hunter S Thompson-style escapade, only instead of a pair of 30-something dudes roving through 60s Vegas, it's two teenage girls let loose in 90s LA - a far more dangerous pairing and unhinged scenario.

Their mission: to find Leonardo DiCaprio and make him Oxford's boyfriend before Titanic turns him into a huge and hence unattainable A-lister.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Oxford at 17 doesn't question her own irresistibility. Dressed in blue velvet trousers, black platform boots "and a velvet tiger-striped top that tied up in the back - (It was the 90s, people)", she and her friend tear around the city getting stoned, dodging cops in a borrowed Mercedes and high-fiving Bill Maher on dance floors.

Predictably, they never find Leo, but their adventures seem far better than meeting him ever could be.

When I meet Oxford in a very hushed library of a smart Manhattan hotel, she shakes my hand tentatively and speaks softly. It turns out she's rather shy, with a sly naughtiness that makes her seem younger than 35.

"I can write funny quips, but I'm not a comedian at all," she explains. So in a social situation she doesn't tell jokes? "No, I totally don't. I've never done stand-up; I don't think I could do it in a million years. Writing online," she says, "was just the thing I did when my kids weren't interested in playing with me."

Discover more

Opinion

Paul Thomas: Trashy and trivial but it's riveting news

17 May 05:43 AM
Entertainment

Social media subverts teens

17 May 05:30 PM
Entertainment

The best and brightest

17 May 10:59 PM
Entertainment

Making his own language

18 May 01:05 AM

Her writing career has ascended - and continues to ascend - with all the effort and premeditation of a tweet. I believe her when she says she never imagined that cracking jokes online would lead to all this.

"I think forcing things is the worst thing you can do for your career," she says. "I think if I'd tried to become a screenwriter I would have been a failure. I would have spent all this time writing this shitty material instead of learning how to write."

Oxford's success may seem easily won but, in fact, she's been writing for years. She was an "early adopter" - writing online in those quaint days of AOL chat rooms and GeoCities sites that characterised the internet's infancy. By the time Twitter arrived in 2006, she'd already built an audience of about 10,000 through her blog.

At first she was sceptical.

"It was just another website," Oxford says. She took until March 2009 to sign up. "It didn't seem it could be super huge, but I knew I could use it - the format was the same as a Facebook status. Those were always most interesting when they were funny, so I thought: 'Oh I'll just make them one-liners."'

Most of them were observations on family life ("One thing I will never do for my son is correct him when he says 'pervalised' instead of 'paralysed"') and she decided early on to have "no filter".

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

It's a phrase she uses repeatedly; it seems to be as much life philosophy as Twitter style sheet.

"I realised," she explains, "that I was entertaining people more when I was letting it go."

The writer and director Diablo Cody was one of the first high-profile figures to champion her online, and after that Hollywood comedians started following her. As the retweets rolled in, her follower count swelled.

Just a year after joining Twitter she was invited to Los Angeles to take part in Night of 140 Tweets, a benefit for Haiti where she was the only non-comedian, actor or working writer.

Then Will & Grace producer Jhoni Marchinko encouraged her to write a spec script on the strength of her Twitter feed. "It didn't really mean that much to me," Oxford says.

She'd been interested in screenwriting but "wasn't actively seeking it. I knew how to do it, but I was like: Oh no, I'm at home with kids, writing a blog, that's what I'm doing." When she sold her first TV pilot to CBS, though, "I was like: Oh, this is real."

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Last year she sold a screenplay called Son of a Bitch to Warner Brothers for a rumoured six figures.

Now, Oxford says, "every single thing I write is going to be bought by somebody because there are so many different studios and TV networks and they're just like: Oh, I want the Kelly Oxford project."

Her follower count is now at about half a million and a lot of those famous followers have become famous friends. She now hangs out with Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Kristen Bell, Jimmy Kimmel, et al in the real, offline world, too. Or rather the not-quite-real world that is Hollywood.

The Oxford family relocated to LA last summer, and she and her husband have effectively swapped roles; he left his job as an environmental engineer and is now a stay-at-home-dad while she works full-time.

Their eldest daughter, Salinger, is 11, their youngest, Beatrix, is 3. And then there's 9-year-old Henry, who, she says, "has a teacher that he hates so much and now he's miserable going to school".

This is exactly where Oxford is able to flaunt an unusual mum-superpower. She smiles: "I told him: 'For the next pilot I write, your teacher is going to be a character in the show.' So now he goes to school and he brings me home all this material. Little does she know I'm going to use all of it!"

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

"I was totally unembarrassable," she says. "I think I still am. What's acceptable and what's not acceptable is basically what's going to hurt somebody. That's the only filter and that's a natural filter by the time you're an adult.

"There are people who deserve criticism. Like the Kardashians. But only because they're not honest about what they're doing! If they went out and straight-up said: 'Yo, all this is happening because I made a porn tape - I don't really have talent', people would embrace them! It's just the falsity."

Oxford's all-honesty philosophy includes not having a publicist. "And I'm not going to, ever," she says, "because I've done everything so far on my own, and it's worked."

There are no doubt thousands of Twitter users now attempting to model careers after hers. Oxford is the prototype of a new kind of celebrity, by which anyone who just happens to be very funny in the 140-character form can push themselves famewards one tweet at a time.

Everything is Perfect When You're a Liar by Kelly Oxford is published by HarperCollins.

Save

    Share this article

Latest from Entertainment

Entertainment

Wētā FX earns dual Emmy nominations for visual effects in hit TV series

Entertainment

Herald NOW Entertainment: Jason Momoa's Chief of War, Justin Baldoni and Emmy nominations are in

Watch
Entertainment

John Torode sacked from MasterChef over upheld racism complaint


Sponsored

Sponsored: Why heat pumps make winter cheaper

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Recommended for you

Outback killer Bradley John Murdoch dies day after murder anniversary of UK tourist
World

Outback killer Bradley John Murdoch dies day after murder anniversary of UK tourist

Ukraine's air defence: Patriot missile systems are useful but no panacea
World

Ukraine's air defence: Patriot missile systems are useful but no panacea

Wētā FX earns dual Emmy nominations for visual effects in hit TV series
Entertainment

Wētā FX earns dual Emmy nominations for visual effects in hit TV series

UK's £7b asylum plan revealed after Afghan data breach super-injunction
World

UK's £7b asylum plan revealed after Afghan data breach super-injunction

'Mind-blowing': Chef's two-ingredient meringue breakthrough
Bay of Plenty Times

'Mind-blowing': Chef's two-ingredient meringue breakthrough

Serious injuries in BoP crash, road closed
Rotorua Daily Post

Serious injuries in BoP crash, road closed



Latest from Entertainment

Wētā FX earns dual Emmy nominations for visual effects in hit TV series
Entertainment

Wētā FX earns dual Emmy nominations for visual effects in hit TV series

The special effects house earned Emmy nods for two high production value TV shows.

15 Jul 09:57 PM
Herald NOW Entertainment: Jason Momoa's Chief of War, Justin Baldoni and Emmy nominations are in
Entertainment

Herald NOW Entertainment: Jason Momoa's Chief of War, Justin Baldoni and Emmy nominations are in

Watch
15 Jul 08:23 PM
John Torode sacked from MasterChef over upheld racism complaint
Entertainment

John Torode sacked from MasterChef over upheld racism complaint

15 Jul 08:18 PM


Sponsored: Why heat pumps make winter cheaper
Sponsored

Sponsored: Why heat pumps make winter cheaper

01 Jul 04:58 PM

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP
search by queryly Advanced Search