Greg Kelly's Four Month Twitter Hiatus Ends Four Months Early

A few years ago, when Alice Munro and Philip Roth announced within months of one another that they planned to retire, The New Yorker mused in a piece titled “Do Writers Really Retire?” that “it does seem unusual, as odd for a writer to be in retirement from words as for a man to be, as William H. Gass once wrote, ‘in retirement from love.’” In related news, New York’s only podcaster Greg Kelly announced in mid-July that he wouldn’t be tweeting for four months.

The Newsmax TV host, who you could call the Alice Munro of tweets (looks Canadian), broke the story in a statement titled: “Greg Kelly STOPS TWEETING and stops RETWEETING for the next FOUR MONTHS. THIS IS MY STATEMENT.” His rationale for retirement was not the ravage of time — he is a virile 52 — but a “BEAUTIFUL OPPORTUNITY.”

A BEAUTIFUL OPPORTUNITY just “fell in my lap” – and with a thriving radio show on WABC, The Greg Kelly Podcast and the TV show, this additional PROJECT will Such Up what remains of my LEISURE TIME. So NO Tweeting for Four Months.

What opportunity would send Greg offline until “sometime between October 15th and October 31st (Halloween Day)?” He did not respond to comment for this piece; Greg would rather show than tell:

The Project is a SECRET. Don’t bother trying to find out because “that’s not gonna happen” – The security arrangements and privacy settings are Password Protected, with one of those really LONG passwords where it’s “case sensitive” and they make you use letters and numbers and Dollar Signs and stuff. At the appropriate time I will “spill ALL the Beans”.

(If you know anything about Greg’s secret plans send them to tips@gawker.com).

A refresher for anyone whose soft grey matter hasn’t been slowly evaporated by Newsmax TV: Kelly hosts an opinion news show called Greg Kelly Reports, where he rotates through a wide range of topics from Trump being good to the Media being bad. Before he joined the big leagues, Kelly co-hosted Fox 5’s Good Day New York, which made him a minor recurring character on Joel McHale’s The Soup, due to his fondness for Burger King-related B-roll and habit of yelping when dogs showed up in newsreels. (For more on this, a useful retrospective).

Kelly’s Twitter went viral in May after he tweeted a picture of himself with Donald Trump. The caption read: “Chillin’ with 45! (And yes, Those are BUGLE BOY jeans I’m wearing),” referring to his pair of hip-hugging $1,200 khakis that he later claimed were Balmain, but one commenter compared to “a Ken doll’s utility man jeggings” stretched over “the back legs of a house cat.”

Like most conservative figures in our age of reboots, Kelly has spent the past five years aping Trump’s online affect, mulching inane political asides and anodyne cultural commentary with the cogency of Foghorn Leghorn on vyvanse. Here are some examples:

Greg tweeting pictures of himself, one of which is a cat:

Greg getting mad about English new wave band Duran Duran appearing on The TODAY Show:

McSalad nostalgia:

Greg making an interesting point about Raytheon:

Greg picking up where The Awl left off:

For an eternal four days, followers could only guess what kept them from Greg’s insights on beef, lapels, airplanes, hydrofoiling, three-day weekends, Uber rides, gym machines, tattoos, and seeing the popstar Halsey (congrats on the baby). But the long winter came to a close on July 15, four days after Greg’s statement:

A few minutes later, it ended again:

Everyone has their doubts about retirement, and for five more days it seemed Greg might have recommitted himself to his pledge. But he called it off on July 20, just in time to livetweet Jeff Bezos’s short-lived space flight. Twitter would stay; Kelly would sacrifice “HORSE stuff” instead – specifically a horse named “Sparky” (if you know anything about this horse and its current owner, email tips@gawker.com).

“As RICHARD NIXON PRESS SECRETARY RON ZIEGLER said,” Kelly wrote, retweeting his original resignation, “this statement is now INOPERATIVE. (However certain portions remain "in effect").

Which parts exactly? If you know, email tips@gawker.com.