The Inventor of This Classic ‘Woke’ Joke Didn’t Know They Were the O.G.

You couldn’t make the original “because of woke” tweet today. 

Of all the thousands of room-temperature-IQ cultural discussions that are currently occurring on Twitter over popular TV and movies, at least 70 percent of them are about some property that premiered at least 10 years ago that, apparently, could not possibly get a green light in this cancel-cultured, trigger-warned, hypersensitive hellscape of snowflake cinema and trans-inclusive television. “You can’t make movies like this nowadays” is an all-too-common claim for some conservative Twitter user to make about classic overtly progressive projects like Blazing Saddles or All in the Family, and the reasoning is always the same: because of woke.

Two years and two days ago, writer and tweeter P.E. Moskowitz posted the perfect and enduring three-word summary of the same argument we’ve seen in every Twitter thread about a 2000s comedy film ever — and they didn’t even know it.

Though the inaugural “because of woke” tweet only amassed a couple thousand likes, it reached the right writers and tweeters who would go on to popularize the joke while Moskowitz forgot that they ever originated the punchline. 

There’s something oddly wholesome that the author of one of the most ubiquitous parodies of tired right-wing talking points got to experience the rise of “because of woke” completely ignorant of the fact that it was their invention that led to so many banger tweets over the past two years. Hopefully, Moskowitz continues to appreciate their surprise legacy without trying to cynically capitalize on the tweet’s influence by turning it into a NFT or something awful like that.

Thankfully, Moskowitz doesn’t seem to have the mind to ruin the bit for a quick buck. Rather, they’re content to bask in the success they didn’t know they had. “anyway i am a genius…,” they tweeted in a follow-up, “why do i feel like i won a pulitzer”

They know why.