There have been many goofs on The Dark Knight Rises’s mask-muffled and puzzlingly accented villain Bane since he was revealed in previews this month, but perhaps only one spoof on the malicious mushmouth transcends the usual Comic Book Guy snark. I’m speaking, as clearly as I can, of @MumbleBane, without a doubt the finest Bane parody on Twitter.
That’s right, there are other Bane Twitters burbling about, including @MuffledBane and @RisesBane, but not all flapdoodle is created equally. What elevates @MumbleBane is that he doesn’t just present garbled versions of regular speech (e.g., from @RisesBane, “Dosh dish mazzg mekmeh shounds funnah?”). No, @MumbleBane takes his parody to the next level, rendering the speech in the intelligently unintelligible manner of Bane himself. Bane, after all, has not just brawn but brains, and the human ear hears his murmuring not merely as sound but as a charming if baffling word salad. As @MumbleBane tweeted recently, “Jackie O cures Ugandan deliverance. Nevermore curse boomerang nettles! Batman in bullrushes, Bane is the cruelty free tangerine!”
The result is nothing less than the best kind of nonsense verse—like a fine cadavre exquis, or Mad Libs. Observe a couple more choice Jabberwockian tweets:
Having comic superheroes and supervillains pop into your Twitter feed is already one of Twitter’s secret pleasures (see also the popular series of Hulk feeds, like the great Feminist Hulk). If you use your Twitter account for work, such feeds offer special enjoyment, adding some surreality to a feed full of news links and wry asides.
But I’ve let myself blather on for too long, when clearly Mumble Bane says it best of all: “Dagobah rickroll. Jazz underbite vengeance! I see hickory kettles grooble and laugh. Gotham burns like an earwig!”
