The Pennsylvania Treasury Twitter is back. This time, it has competition for laughs.

U.S. Sen Kyrsten Sinema (I., Ariz.) riffing on Barbenheimer. A division of the FBI using “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” to solicit tips about organized crime. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission using a surrealist frog meme to warn about kitchen safety.

Politicians and government agencies make cringe attempts at viral memes so frequently that it can feel as if the practice originated with Twitter, the platform now called X. In reality, the art of the perfectly crafted, casual-yet-vaguely informative political tweet was actually honed in Pennsylvania by the state treasury department under former Treasurer Joe Torsella.

Everyone else, it appears, is just a poor imitation.

“I see some of this newer stuff as sacrilege to what we did. ... It’s painful to watch,” said Mike Connolly, then-deputy state treasurer of communications, who ran @PATreasury from 2019 to its end in December 2020, when Torsella was unseated by current state treasurer Stacy Garrity.

@PATreasury acted as Torsella’s alter-ego, using a mix of brash memes, proletariat sentiment, and tech billionaire takedowns to advance the office’s mission of increasing financial literacy and overhauling pension fund operations. The account used to have more than 31,000 followers.

Now, it has only 304. Emboldened by the platform’s lax policies about inactive usernames, Connolly restarted @PATreasury in May — this time with no affiliation to Torsella and a lot more dry policy discussion.

» READ MORE: Pa.’s treasurer had two Twitter accounts: one staid, one subversively millennial

Brands constantly post for relatability and a laugh, but when a branch of government does, it feels irreverent and illicit, like seeing your boss let loose at a company happy hour.

And though this approach can increase the reach of smaller agencies and lesser-known politicians, it’s hard to say whether humanizing government actually works.

“Just because you can have a personality online, doesn’t mean you should,” said Annie Wu Henry, a Philadelphia-based digital strategist who ran John Fetterman’s TikTok. “There is still an understanding that we put a lot of taxpayer dollars into government agencies and their chief job is to function well.”

Connolly said the success of @PATreasury’s first iteration didn’t have much to do with his being particularly funny, but rather everyone else being distinctly unfunny.

“Government is abysmal at all levels of doing social media, 95% of it is just drivel nonsense,” Connolly said. “So, it wasn’t that our content was so great, it was that everything else was so bad.”

Connolly called the then-Twitter account a “seat-of-the the-pants” operation, something he worked on solo while dedicating attention to traditional media outreach. And yet, @PATreasury took on a life beyond the treasurer’s office, earning obituaries upon its demise that called it an “early adopter among government accounts to the language of Twitter.”

» READ MORE: Opinion | Pa. politicians shine on Twitter. Look to hot dog maps, wedding plans, and @PaTreasury for proof.

“It was breaking the rules of what government agencies do in terms of communication, but following the rules of Twitter,” said Dannagal Young, a University of Delaware professor who researches the impact of political humor and satire. “The medium shaped the voice of the platform.”

The original @PATreasury influenced at least two prolific government memers: Pearl Gabel and Megan Coyne, who used the state’s social media to transform New Jersey’s reputation from “dirty jerz” (derogatory) to “dirty jerz” (superlative).

For their part, the @NJGov X account used quick rebukes of haters — such as the time they replied “your mom” to a detractor to the tune of 71,000 retweets — to get eyes on their other posts: emergency updates and information about state programs.

Now, just about every branch of government is trying to earn a chuckle using the distinct language of the internet, from national parks and a sewer authority to police departments and Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.). They have varying degrees of success.

So, when don’t the jokes land? When audiences can tell they’re contrived or inauthentic.

“I mean you can do a Barbie tweet because everyone else is doing it, but what’s the point if it doesn’t make sense with everything else?” said Henry.

Do constituents care that you are famous on the platform that used to be called Twitter?

Sometimes. Though it’s a hard sell to say that Fetterman’s social media strategy won him the Senate race, it did expose him to voters he might not have otherwise reached. And for lesser known government agencies, a well-written tweet can be the first step in getting people to take advantage of social programs or understand arcane fiscal policy.

“In a time when there’s less and less trust in public institutions (sometimes for good reasons), our Twitter presence helped rebuild that bridge … and created a kind of real conversation and accessibility that is rare,” Torsella told The Inquirer by email.

Torsella believes the @PATreasury account exposed otherwise unreachable constituents to the treasurer’s office. “There are certainly a lot more Pennsylvanians who, for example, have 529 accounts or unclaimed property or EITC claims today because of it,” he said.

Gabel, a self-proclaimed Jersey girl and founder of communications firm Grit Strategies, was just happy that @NJGov helped people think differently of New Jersey. “For me, personally, having New Jersey be cool was a win,” she said, though she wonders whether the account inadvertently trained followers to have false expectations of what the government should sound like.

Perhaps @NJGov — alongside politicians streaming on Twitch — has conditioned some to expect all politicians to have distinct online personas, forcing jokes about tragedies or the creation of fake personal narratives.

“I hope we didn’t do that,” Gabel said. “It’s unfair to expect humor from a government.”

Under Connolly, the new @PATreasury has just over 300 followers on X, 13 on competitor BlueSky, and the same hatred of Elon Musk it always had.

“In terms of real value to a company, there’s a strong argument to be made that a rat chewing wires in a data center is a better senior executive than Elon Musk,” Connolly tweeted from the account in July. It received 13 likes.

Mixed in with slam dunks on Rhode Island and Piers Morgan are discussions about investing. It’s like a greatest hits album, only Connolly doesn’t believe the account will go viral again.

“I still feel like I have a duty to folks to be democratizing knowledge about financial policy,” Connolly said. “But it’s not at the same level as it was when I was deputy, and that’s fine.”