#28: How God Turned Tweets into a Broadway Show

Javerbaum originally opened the account to promote a book, a new testament for the modern age – he just hadn’t written it yet. Javerbaum planned to extrapolate the jokes from Twitter into a fully-realized text. He finally finished in 2012, but The Last Testament: A Memoir by God didn’t do nearly as well as the Twitter account. “That’s a shame, because God’s previous books have sold in the billions,” Javerbaum says. “I explained to him that there’s a new publishing paradigm and that digital has really undercut a lot of book sales.”

But @TheTweetofGod has a surprising third act. Javerbaum recently turned his one-liners into a Broadway play. An Act of God, starring Jim Parsons from The Big Bang Theory as God (or, more precisely, as the normal chump whom God temporarily possesses to address the audience), opened in New York City in late May. It combines some of Javerbaum’s best tweets with his faux-memoir for a long and funny sermon from the stage.

Javerbaum studied theater at New York University and has always loved Broadway. Now that he has a critically acclaimed show there, his entire career seems like it was reverse-engineered: the comedy writing career, the gangbusters Twitter account, and moderately successful book were just ways to get a shot at a Tony Award. “I won’t stop until I have every shiny thing imaginable,” he says. “The Tony, the Pulitzer, the Oscar, the Nebula prize for science fiction, the Clio for advertising.”