Is trolling an art?
It certainly is for Ken M. McCarthy, who plays a "well-meaning moron on the internet." Ken M.'s notes on broken comments sections like Yahoo, syndicated news sites and branded Facebook pages have earned the self-proclaimed “greatest troll” 150,000 fans on Reddit and 40,000 on Facebook. Some of his favorite threads include discussions such as "Brain cells can outlive the body" or "noodle versus meat ratio." Ken M prefers to remain anonymous, and his fans would prefer it that way too.
They don’t want the character “demystified,” as Ken M. puts it, and would much rather imagine Ken as a 60-something retiree rather than a Gen-X hacker.
“The sites that have the most dysfunctional comment communities are the ones that I go to. Yahoo is interesting to me because these are older people who still for some strange reason feel compelled to misbehave in this way, ” Ken M. says.
Makes you wonder what they did before the internet?
“I say one thing and they say Whaddya mean? and then I drop the punchline," Ken M. explains, adding, "There’s something so pure about that corny old-timey joke structure that I love, and I love the fact that these people don’t know that they’re part of it.. But when I start with something and somebody sort of forces me to take it in a different direction, that challenge is really, really fun. How to double down without blowing your cover."