Confirmed   69,572


ADVERTISEMENT

Background

On April 24th, 2013, Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder[1] tweeted a proposal for an experiment instructing his followers to text message their parents “got 2 grams for $40," immediately follow up with a second text asking them to ignore it and tweet a screnshot of their response. The comedian later explained that he devised the idea with the help of Michael Koman[7], the co-creator of Fielder’s Comedy Central television show Nathan For You. Within two days, the tweet had been retweeted more than 4,100 times and favorited more than 2,000 times.


ADVERTISEMENT

Fielder's Twitter Experiments

In the weeks leading up to the "2 grams for $40" experiment, Fielder attempted to launch similar pranks on parents via Twitter on at least two occasions; his first idea[13], tweeted on April 13th, 2013, instructed his followers to simply e-mail the word "help" to their parents, followed by another proposal,[14] tweeted on April 20th, asking people to message their fathers inquiring about the quality of condoms purchased at a dollar store. Both of Fielder's prior experiments were met by at least a dozen responses. (shown below)

Notable Developments

April 24th: Twitter Responses

Five minutes after Fielder’s tweet, a follower by the name of Levi Carstensen responded with a screenshot of the text message he had sent to his mom, noting that his father called him immediately afterwards.

In the following hours, Fielder retweeted dozens of responses from his followers' parents. Also on the 24th, a thread discussing the experiment and its results was posted to the IGNforums[8], but none of the posters actually completed the action.

April 25th: Blog Coverage

On April 25th, Buzzfeed[3] reported on Fielder's Twitter experiment with a compilation of screenshot responses. Throughout the day, the experiment was featured on Deadspin[5], Dangerous Minds[9], the Daily Mail[10], Gawker[4], Uproxx[12], and Splitsider.[11] Additionally, Comedy Central[6] posted a collection of the screenshot responses on its Tumblr blog, where they gained nearly 224,000 notes within a day.

Notable Responses

Search Interest

External References



Share Pin

Recent Images 23 total


Recent Videos 0 total

There are no recent videos.




Load 30 Comments
See more