Are Any of Gavin Newsom’s Tweets Actually Funny?

Scroll through Gavin Newsom’s feed on X (the platform we all still call Twitter in our hearts), and you’ll see a very specific brand of political comedy: ALL-CAPS proclamations, melodramatic hero shots, and jokes about “MAGA tears” served with a side of smug. It’s the California governor as online comedian, trolling his opponents one viral post at a time.

But the question Cracked.com lobbed into the discourse is brutal in its simplicity: Are any of Gavin Newsom’s tweets actually funny? Not “politically effective,” not “good for fundraising,” just… funny. As in: Would you laugh if you stripped away the blue check, the title, and the context?

To figure that out, we have to zoom in on Newsom’s social media persona, look at the jokes he’s trying to land, compare them to what humor research says actually works, and ask the one thing politicians rarely want to hear about their Twitter game: Is this joke landing, or is it just loud?

The Rise of Gavin Newsom, Twitter Troll-in-Chief

For years, politicians used social media mostly to post press releases in paragraph form. Newsom has no interest in that. He’s positioned himself as the Democrats’ online gladiator, leaning into sharp-tongued clapbacks and Trump-style showmanship rather than dry policy threads.

In recent months his team has:

• Posted ALL-CAPS rants mimicking Trump’s bombastic cadence, complete with nicknames and melodrama.
• Shared AI-generated images and parody memes, including awkwardly staged “handshakes” and superhero-style glamour shots.
• Hawked tongue-in-cheek merch that riffs on MAGA hats and culture-war slogans.
• Released a mock medical report declaring him the “healthiest human alive,” a parody of glowing health notes for his rival.

In other words, Newsom isn’t just tweeting; he’s doing a full-blown impression of the Trump-era internet, complete with exaggerated self-praise. The vibe is very “What if I play your game, but better?”

What Cracked.com Says: The Short Answer Is “No”

Cracked.com, a site that has spent years ranking and dissecting the funniest tweets on the internet, took a look at Newsom’s timeline and essentially shrugged. Their verdict boiled down to: objectively funny? Not really. Mildly amusing if you already agree with him? Sure. But comedy that stands on its own without a partisan filter? That’s a tougher sell.

The piece treats Newsom’s tweets like any other jokes: Would they survive outside the political bubble? If you stripped away the context and just read the punchline, would you share it with a friend who doesn’t follow U.S. politics like a sport?

Cracked’s answer leans toward no because so much of the humor depends on:

• Inside baseball references to specific hearings, scandals, or speeches.
• Preexisting dislike of Trump and MAGA figures.
• Platform drama (X vs. Truth Social, blue checks, quote-tweet beefs) that most normal humans do not track like it’s the NFL.

That doesn’t mean the tweets never work as political messaging. It just means that, to a comedy site that sees actual professional comics grinding out jokes, Newsom’s stuff feels more like political dunking than genuine stand-up material.

Anatomy of a Newsom Tweet

To judge whether his posts are funny, it helps to look at the styles he keeps repeating. If Newsom has a “bit,” what is it?

The Trump Parody ALL-CAPS Bit

One of his most common moves is to parody Trump’s posting style: long, rambling, all-caps bursts of praise for himself and doom for his enemies. Newsom will repackage that cadence to talk about California’s pandemic response, climate policies, or Trump’s latest headline.

The joke is basically: “Look, I can do your voice better than you can.” For people who are exhausted by Trump’s style, that parody can feel cathartic. There’s a certain satisfaction in watching a polished, photogenic governor aggressively lean into online pettiness.

The problem is that parody of parody is hard. Trump’s own posts already read like a late-night sketch half the time. Once reality is that exaggerated, mimicking it has to be extremely sharp to feel fresh. A lot of Newsom’s parody posts land closer to “Yeah, I get it” than to “Okay, that’s actually hilarious.”

The AI and Meme Theater

Another branch of the Newsom content tree is visual satire: AI-generated videos and memes where he appears next to Trump, dwarfs him, or symbolically “wins” the interaction. Think superhero posters, fake magazine covers, and mock campaign imagery.

These visuals are usually less about a punchline and more about a vibe: I’m in on the joke, I know you’re doomscrolling, and I’m having fun with it. It’s a kind of meme-era performance art where the governor understands that if you’re going to be a main character online, you might as well play it like a bit.

Are those images technically “funny”? Sometimes they’re closer to “clever branding” than laugh-out-loud comedy. They’re memes that double as campaign posters, and that’s doing a lot of work for one JPEG.

Merch, MAGA Tears, and Self-Aware Clout Chasing

One of Newsom’s more on-the-nose moves has been the rollout of merch that riffs on Trump’s signature style. Instead of pretending to be above the fray, he leans directly into it, selling items that mock MAGA culture while still, of course, raising money and attention.

This is where “funny” and “strategic” overlap. From a comedy standpoint, the gag is simple: “I’m going to out-Trump Trump by using his own aesthetic and turning it on its head.” From a political standpoint, it helps keep him at the center of the attention economy.

Whether you laugh probably depends on how you feel about trolling as a public-service skill. If you love online dunks, it’s fun. If you’d prefer basic governance over merch drops, the joke wears thin faster.

What Makes a Tweet Actually Funny?

Strip away the politics for a second and think about the funniest tweets you’ve ever seen. They usually have:

• Surprise – the punchline goes somewhere you didn’t expect.
• Specificity – oddly precise details that make the joke feel real.
• Relatability – you recognize yourself, your friends, or your group chat in it.
• Brevity – it doesn’t take three screenshots to land.

Politicians face an extra challenge: their jokes are always read through a partisan lens. If you already like the politician, you’re more inclined to chuckle. If you don’t, the exact same line reads as cringe.

Newsom’s feed hits a couple of those marks: there’s surprise when he drops a perfectly timed dig, and there’s specificity in his references to particular Trump quotes or news cycles. But relatability is harder. Most of his humor is aimed at people who are very online, very up to date on the latest outrage, and already primed to cheer when he swings at conservative targets.

That’s probably why a comedy site can look at the same material and say, “These aren’t really jokes; they’re cheers.” They function more like political slogans shaped into tweet form than like jokes that stand on their own legs.

“Funny” vs. “Effective”: Two Very Different Questions

There’s also a big difference between being funny and being effective online. A tweet can:

• Win the day’s news cycle;
• Dominate cable-news chyrons;
• Rally donors and volunteers;
• And still not actually be that funny.

Newsom’s trolling clearly works in terms of visibility. People quote it, argue about it, write think pieces about it, and use it as shorthand for the Democrats “finally fighting back.” That’s success on one axis: attention.

On the comedy axis, though, you can see why humor nerds are unimpressed. A lot of the jokes are essentially calling someone a loser in increasingly creative fonts. The stakes are real, but the structure is still playground-level: “You’re ridiculous; I’m not.”

If you’re comparing that to the best comedy writing on social media, it’s easy to land where Cracked did: funny for a governor, maybe; funny period? Less so.

Why Politician Humor Is So Hard to Pull Off

Humor researchers and leadership experts have pointed out that when people in power try to be funny on social media, the bar is both higher and weirder. Leaders who crack jokes risk coming across as unprofessional, trivializing serious issues, or punching down.

At the same time, we now expect public figures to be more informal and “real” online. We’ve seen everything from senators posting dad jokes to national-security agencies joining Twitter with pun-filled intros. The reaction is almost always mixed: half the audience thinks it’s a fun humanizing touch, and the other half thinks it’s deeply embarrassing.

Newsom is operating right in the middle of that tension. His defenders see his posts as savvy, self-aware trolling that finally speaks internet fluently. His critics see a governor LARPing as a reply guy when there are fires, floods, and budget fights to worry about.

Comedy, meanwhile, doesn’t care about your title. A joke either lands or it doesn’t. You don’t get bonus points because your day job comes with a motorcade.

So… Are Any of Gavin Newsom’s Tweets Actually Funny?

If we’re grading on a pure comedy scale, the honest answer is probably:
sometimes, but not as often as the retweets would suggest.

When Newsom lands a good line, it usually has at least one of these elements:

• A clever inversion of Trump’s over-the-top self-praise.
• A specific, absurd detail that makes the parody feel sharp instead of generic.
• Timing that lines up perfectly with whatever video clip or quote is circulating that hour.

But a lot of the time, his posts are functioning more as team signals than as jokes: “We are the side that mocks that guy.” For his base, that’s enjoyable enough. For neutral comedy audiences, it’s less impressive. At that point, you aren’t really a comedian; you’re doing brand voice with punchlines.

Maybe the better question isn’t “Are his tweets funny?” but “What job are his tweets actually trying to do?” If the job is to make Democrats feel less alone in the timeline, to rile up opponents, and to keep his name in circulation, then mission accomplished. If the job is to rival actual comedians and comedy writers? That’s where the Cracked.com skepticism starts to look pretty justified.

Watching the Bit in Real Time: What the Experience Feels Like

If you spend any time on political Twitter, you know the experience of watching the Newsom bit play out in real time. It usually goes something like this:

First, there’s a breaking story: a rally clip, a bizarre quote, a new batch of merch from Trump’s world, or some fresh controversy that lights up the feeds. Within a few hours, Newsom’s account appears in your timeline with a carefully calibrated post that looks like it was drafted by equal parts speechwriter, meme admin, and campaign manager.

Maybe it’s an all-caps riff that sounds uncannily like Trump’s truth-social style, except the content is flipped to praise California or slam a particular policy. Maybe it’s an AI-generated image where the governor is shaking hands with his rival while smirking directly into the camera. Whatever it is, the point is clear: I can play your game and still look good doing it.

Then the reactions fire up. In group chats, someone drops a screenshot with, “Okay this one actually made me laugh,” while another friend replies, “I don’t know, man, this is kind of corny.” On the platform itself, quote-tweets start piling up: some praising him for “finally fighting fire with fire,” others rolling their eyes at yet another politician turning governance into content.

If you’re not a hardcore partisan, the experience is oddly split. Part of you appreciates the precision with which these posts are engineered. The timing is impeccable, the copy hits all the right neural buttons, and you can practically see the strategy meeting that birthed each gag. Another part of you can’t help noticing that the jokes start to blur together: more dunking, more caps, more mock-sincere self-praise.

Over weeks and months, a pattern emerges. Newsom is not dropping in occasionally with a one-liner; he’s treating social media like a recurring sketch series where he plays the role of “Trump-adjacent internet brawler.” Each new tweet is another episode. Some are sharper, some are weaker, but they’re all pushing the same narrative: he’s willing to mix it up in the places where politics feels more like pro wrestling than public service.

That can be fun to watchespecially if you’re used to leaders who seem allergic to humor. It can also be exhausting. There are days when a parody health memo or a new round of trolling hits your feed and you catch yourself thinking, “This is entertaining, but is anything actually getting better?”

And that’s where the Cracked.com question hits hardest. It’s not just about whether the tweets are funny in a vacuum. It’s about how it feels to live in a world where our governors are also semi-professional posters, battling it out for the day’s best clapback. Sometimes you laugh; sometimes you wince; and sometimes you close the app and wonder if jokes, even decent ones, are really what you came to politics for in the first place.

Final Thoughts

So, are any of Gavin Newsom’s tweets actually funny? Sure, some of them. He has good timing, a sharp eye for the absurd, and a team that understands the rhythms of the modern internet. But a lot of what reads as “hilarious” in a partisan bubble lands more like branded snark to everyone else.

In the end, his feed is less a stand-up routine than a long-running political bit: part trolling, part marketing, part therapy for people who want to see their side clap back just as hard. Whether that counts as comedy or just content may depend less on the governor and more on how tired you are of politics doubling as entertainment.