@dril is a pseudonymous Twitter user best known for his idiosyncratic style of absurdist humor and non-sequiturs. The account and the character associated with the tweets are all commonly referred to as dril (the account's username on Twitter) or wint (the account's intermittent display name), both rendered lowercase but often capitalized by others. Since his first tweet in 2008, dril has gained more than 1.8 million followers.
Dril is one of the most notable accounts associated with "Weird Twitter", a subculture on the site that shares a surreal, ironic sense of humor. The character associated with dril is highly distinctive, often described as a bizarre reflection of a typical male American Internet user. Other social media users have repurposed dril's tweets for humorous or satiric effect in a variety of political and cultural contexts. Many of dril's tweets, phrases, and tropes have become familiar parts of Internet slang.
The few available details about his life fueled speculation about his identity, though a large contingent of his fanbase insisted that others respect his choice to maintain his privacy. In 2017, following a doxing incident, a piece from New York suggested the author's identity. Dril was identified as Paul Dochney (born 1987). Dochney typically responded to press inquiries "in character". Dochney confirmed his identity on several occasions thereafter, and in 2023 he participated in his first interview under his own name at The Ringer.
Beyond tweeting, Dochney funds his work through Patreon, has created animated short films and contributed illustrations and writing to other artists' collaborative projects. His first book, Dril Official "Mr. Ten Years" Anniversary Collection (2018), is a compilation of the account's "greatest hits" alongside new illustrations. In 2019 he announced the launch of a streaming web series called Truthpoint: Darkweb Rising, an InfoWars parody co-created with comedian Derek Estevez-Olsen for Adult Swim. Writers have praised dril for his originality and humor; for example, poet Patricia Lockwood said of him: "he is a master of tone, he is a master of character".
Biography Dochney was born in June 1987. He grew up in New Jersey, raised by working-class parents: his father worked as a manager at FedEx while his mother, a homemaker, sought out odd jobs for additional income. After dropping out of college on his first attempt, he restarted at Wilmington University in Delaware and attained a BA in media design (i.e., graphic and web design). He moved to Philadelphia in the late 2010s. By the early 2020s, Dochney resided in Greater Los Angeles.
Dochney was an avid Internet user from early childhood. By the 2000s, he was posting at the Something Awful forums under the name "gigantic drill". He spent most of his time posting artwork to the site's "Fuck You and Die" (FYAD) forum. According to David Thorpe, a former Something Awful admin, gigantic drill was known as "just a guy who was posting funny stuff on there", but never one of the site's featured front page writers. Dril joined Twitter about two years after its launch, adopting the handle "@dril" because the correctly spelled "@drill" had already been taken. Dril sent his first tweet, the single word "no", on September 15, 2008.
Later, when reflecting on the state of Twitter at the time of his first tweet, dril said "everyone was just posting bullshit like, 'Oh, this is what I had for lunch.' It was just, like, tech guys posting inane details about their lives. I posted 'no' because I didn't care for it at the time. I still really don't care for it." The @dril account then remained silent on Twitter for nine months before his second tweet—"how do i get cowboy paint off a dog."—and has posted regularly in the years since.
Identity
Dochney initially maintained anonymity; for many years, little was known about the author behind the @dril account. When asked about the account's longtime anonymity during a private Q&A in 2017, he responded "i am an almost 30 year old man and i could not really care less about the Authenticity of the platform i use to convey dick jokes." Jacob Bakkila, one of the writers behind the @Horse_ebooks Twitter account, hinted in 2013 that the person behind dril had once hired him for a project. Bakkila told BuzzFeed that dril's author was a graphic designer living somewhere in the New York metropolitan tri-state area. BuzzFeeds John Herrman and Katie Notopoulos speculated that the account might be a collaborative project or that Bakkila himself was behind it. Bakkila denied the rumor that he was dril, adding that dril was "a friend" who had contributed to the @Horse_ebooks sequel, Bear Stearns Bravo.
On November 16, 2017, a Tumblr post identifying dril's author as Paul Dochney went viral. Other posts identifying Dochney existed as early as 2014 on Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit, but these earlier posts had not gone viral or been publicized in the media. The 2017 post unmasked dril through "informed guesswork" founded on other clues, including a LinkedIn page associated with Bear Stearns Bravo and a writing credit on Hiveswap, an adventure game set in the universe of Andrew Hussie's long-running webcomic Homestuck.
The Tumblr post was described by the press as a "doxing": an unwelcome broadcasting of private personal information online. The post was met with backlash and dismay among Twitter users, many of whom voiced a preference for keeping dril's personal identity a mystery and preserving the author's privacy. According to Jozefien Wouters, writing for the Belgian news magazine Knack:
Dril addressed the doxing on his Patreon page, writing "everything's normal. i guess im 'doxxed' now. sorry. it's fine. i really give a shit." In a Reddit "ask us anything" interview, dril confirmed that he had worked on Hiveswap. He said the personal impact of the doxing had been minimal, adding that people had been "surprisingly normal" and he had no "sordid past" to hide, but also described being outed as "my Cross to bear" and said "theres nothing scandalous enough there to make it worth publicizing and looking like an ass hole while doing so."
In August 2018, the Twitter account announced that dril was transferring the publishing rights of his tweets to Paul Dochney, whom he called his "Agent And Master", for the purpose of publishing his first book. Some reporters subsequently identified dril as Dochney. In a 2020 Reddit AMA, dril commented, "i doxxed myself so amazon would give me permission to publish my other book last year. im some guy named paul dochney who cares big whoop." Dochney gave his first fully "out-of-character" interview under his own name in April 2023, when he was profiled at The Ringer. The latter interview solidified his intent to be publicly identified under his personal name.
Character and writing style Dochney writes dril tweets in character, using an avatar of a blurry image of Jack Nicholson smiling and wearing sunglasses. Although there is no consistent narrative, the "voice" or "character" is considered highly distinctive. Writer Alexander McDonough called dril a "grinning Jack Nicholson with severe persecution and self-esteem issues, poor physical health, and a bizarre love/hate relationship with cops." Bijan Stephen at The Verge likened dril to an online version of the "wise fool" stock character.
Critics have described dril's voice as an amalgamation of ordinary Internet users, most of all those who are arrogant, obsessive, ignorant, or hapless. Professor of English literature Roger Bellin describes the character of dril as "generally a recognizable type: a self-important buffoon who's often raging out (show yourself, coward), or other times preening (buddy, they won't even let me), over some bit of nonsense that we're all meant to realize is absurdly unimportant." Vice reviewer Rachel Pick describes dril as "a bumbling, maladapted fool ... a pudgy, oily man, frequently in a state of undress, who doesn't go through life as much as he is spilled across it." According to The A.V. Clubs Clayton Purdom, dril is a sort of patron saint of Internet users, or "your uncle's search history come to life and filtered through a scabrous comic sensibility, and ... possibly the most popular, beloved man on the entire internet (after, maybe, The Rock)." Christine Erickson at Mashable said dril's character was like "a spambot equivalent to the kind of crazy that Clint Eastwood portrays". At Kotaku, Gita Jackson called dril a "joke account that also inadvertently catalogues ... every way to be mad online".
In a lecture given at the University of Pennsylvania, American poet Patricia Lockwood described dril as a literary alter ego of Twitter users and the Internet in general. Comparing the account's persona to Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Lockwood cited dril as an example of new possibilities in first-person narrative that could be explored online. Lockwood said of dril:
Dril's tweets are, in the words of Jordan Sargent at Gawker, a series of "quietly seething and unhinged avant-garde scribblings". His tweets are deliberately peppered with odd typos like misspelled words, grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors, and eggcorns. Yohann Koshy in Vice said dril's writing "reads like obscene nonsense verse—the syntax mutilated, the humour irredeemable". In the preface to his first book, dril called his writing style "Prestige Short Prose". Pick suggested that the phrase was likely "meant to make fun of the snobby lit theory types who want to make Dril out to be some highbrow art project", but she concluded it was an apt term to describe dril's style of "part art form, part jokes to read on the toilet". Pick also compared dril's writing to the surreal one-liner jokes of Jack Handey and the flash fiction short story "For sale: baby shoes, never worn". Jonah Engel Bromwich, in The New York Times, said dril was a major influence on the spread of dialogue, written in the same method as screenwriting, as a comedic writing style on Twitter.
Dril has been identified as one of the "most revered" and "quintessential" accounts associated with the "Weird Twitter" scene, a loose subculture of associated users who share a surreal, ironic, subversive sense of humor. dril was one of many Weird Twitter personalities who migrated to Twitter from Something Awful's FYAD board and carried over the forum's in-jokes and tone. Like others on Weird Twitter, dril's tweets have been described as having a dadaist sensibility. Writing for Complex, Brenden Gallagher compared dril to a musician who refuses to sell out or an auteurist indie filmmaker, as Twitter's version of "the enigmatic figure that even [an art form's] best known practitioners look to with reverence". Sean T. Collins described dril's humor as a "blend of fist-on-the-table bluster, abject confusion and burned-toast syntax", noting the influence of surreal humor found in Monty Python (especially the sketches from their show Monty Python's Flying Circus and Terry Gilliam's animations) and Adult Swim shows like Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Collins called dril's tweets "a new way to be funny, with a rhythm and vocabulary all their own. I love it."
Motivation and satirical elements Most of dril's writing is understood to be absurd, surreal, ironic, or nonsensical. An article about dril in The Oxford Student singled out this 2011 dril tweet as the account's guiding "manifesto":
Providing an ostensibly out-of-character statement to BuzzFeed for an oral history on "Weird Twitter" in 2013, dril commented on the nature of his work and motivation:
In a 2017 Reddit AMA, he commented: