Sun explains, “It’s supposed to read like the experience of joining Twitter and following a bunch of people and seeing all their tweets on your timeline.” The animals are deliberately cute, rendered in an unadorned style. Sun thinks of them as icons — or avatars — and compares them to the people we view on social media. “You don’t necessarily engage with a tweet the same way you’d engage with a real person,” he says. “Twitter is often thought of as a shallow, superficial thing. In reality, there’s a lot of honest pathos and humanity in it.”

When Sun first started paying attention to Twitter, in 2011, he followed several professional comedians but quickly grew bored with their self-promotion. Then he stumbled on a demimonde that has come to be known as Weird Twitter. “It was funny in a way I didn’t know you could be funny,” Sun told me. These loosely affiliated, offbeat miniaturists were sending up the format of traditional jokes by undercutting the expectation of a punch line, using textual elements (odd spacing, spelling, punctuation), creating tiny scripts or warping grammar to comedic ends. Sun began responding to their jokes, and then writing his own. Weird Twitter began to retweet him; he was weird by association, and then by commission. Now his account has far more followers than many of the humorists he admired — often by a factor of 10.

“Part of my working theory on comedy — and maybe just all art — is that it’s supposed to feel like an inside joke, but you’re supposed to try to get everyone to feel like they’re in on the inside joke,” he said. One feature of humor on Twitter is how little is typically known of the author. The platform opens the door for a lot of chilling, dispiriting, consequence-free vitriol, but it also removes some of the preliminary gatekeepers to reaching an audience. If you’re consistently funny, you’re consistently funny. People will share what you write. “You can’t talk about humor online without talking about underrepresented communities,” Sun says.

Twitter offered an alternative route for Sun, who is Asian, to catch the eye of traditional media, just as it has for many others. Professional comedy writing has long been a white-male preserve, but Twitter has helped quite a few people who don’t fit that mold — people like Megan Amram, Shelby Fero and Demi Adejuyigbe — to gain admission to the club. “With Asian-American representation,” Sun says, “we still aren’t at the level where we have that many people to look up to yet. Someone tweeted me and said, ‘When I found out you were Asian, I started crying, because I’d never seen anyone like that doing what you do.’ ”

Fans like Lin-Manuel Miranda admire what Sun has done. “Establishing a distinctive worldview, an indelible character, and adapting his voice to the world as it unfolds on Twitter: That’s a lot to accomplish in 140 characters,” Miranda told me. Another well-known Twitter comedian, known simply as @darth, told me over chat that jomny sun “just makes reading twitter bearable. ... all the terrible news and then an aliebn.”

Sun has his share of dissenters too. There is a fine line in comedy — in writing, in art — between voice and tic. One Weird Twitter stalwart publicly wondered how “that Jonny Sun guy” could post something like “fimding a melen :)” and get thousands of retweets. Another comedian with a popular Twitter account lampooned Sun’s sensibility:

doctor: sir ur dying

jomny sun: flowmers are beautifel n we shld kiss all the cloumds

Sun is aware of the limits of this tactic, but as he points out, Twitter is a very crowded room in which to be heard. “When you see the ‘gimmicky’ stuff online,” he told me, “it’s not necessarily a gimmick, it’s just something with a strong voice that cuts through everything else.” But the voice that holds your attention on social media can sound like shouting in an empty room when it has to carry a book or a TV show. (See “$#*! My Dad Says.”) “That’s the balance to strike,” Sun acknowledges.

Sun’s parents are medical researchers who emigrated from China to Calgary in the 1980s. “I think my feelings of being an outsider and not being able to connect — those come down to me as an Asian-Canadian and not really feeling at home anywhere,” Sun told me. The family moved to Toronto when Sun was 11, which offered a more cosmopolitan environment. Still, Sun remained socially anxious and awkward. By the time he got to high school, he felt virtually invisible. He evaporated in groups, never spoke in class. But after school, everyone got on MSN Chat, and it was as if his high school recreated itself online. Here he felt liberated. People who would walk past him without acknowledgment seemed to enjoy his personality. “I was able to be funny and natural through the keyboard and awkward and quiet and weird in person,” he told me. “I wonder how many writers of this generation figured out how to write through chat.”