'He has such a gift': Josiah Johnson, the king of #NBATwitter, is taking over the world one joke at a time (2024)

WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — Josiah Johnson chuckles to himself and glances down at his iPhone screen.

“OK, I got somethin’,” he says with a smile, his graying curls poking out from underneath his backward, black baseball hat.

Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic had just been knocked on his back on the baseline, his body parallel to the two sidelines and his head facing the line of cameras underneath the basket. The first quarter of Game 7 in the Mavericks’ first-round series against the Clippers was over, but Doncic glanced back at a cameraman who happened to be broadcasting live to the world, providing a unique angle and quick thumbs-up reaction shot that instantly flooded timelines.

“Everybody saw that moment,” Johnson said. “You know there’s like 10 different companies dealing with this right now, struggling to get it out. ‘Oh, what’s the caption supposed to be?’”

He saves a screen grab and waits for the next commercial break. Common sense and experience taught him people check their phones on commercial breaks. He wants his tweet to be the first thing they see on their timelines.

“I had to learn, ‘Oh, I gotta get this sh*t out quick. I don’t have time to spend hours thinking about it,” Johnson said. “That’s what a lot of companies are learning. They’ll spend all this time and money on Photoshops and elaborate graphics and it’s like, ‘I just posted a screengrab from ‘The Wire’ of Omar and it’s gonna get way more engagement than the thing you did that took hours and hours and paid a graphic designer to do.’”

At the next break in the action, Johnson fires away with a PG-13 caption, banking on the relatability of an experience countless teen boys have endured. Almost 7,000 retweets and more than 60,000 likes later, his latest viral tweet is taking over #NBATwitter, prompting lots of laughs and plenty of counterfeits that don’t cite the joke’s originator.

When your parents open the door without knocking pic.twitter.com/vgnjHDp8G0

— Josiah Johnson (@KingJosiah54) June 6, 2021

Before and since, Johnson has crafted plenty of viral tweets that take over the timeline of anyone even moderately plugged into NBA Twitter. And not just fans. Players are some of his biggest fans, including LeBron James, who shouted out Johnson once last month after Johnson’s post jabbed Nets forward Bruce Brown’s ill-fated attempt at a game-winning, contested layup and again after Johnson clowned Lakers guard Alex Caruso’s arrest for marijuana possession in College Station, Texas.

For 39-year-old Johnson, a self-proclaimed LeBron loyalist who coined his own Twitter account name as a mixture of James’ nickname and the boy king Josiah from The Bible, it was a big moment. A friend later blew up the tweet on a poster and gave it to Johnson as a gift.

Man @KingJosiah54 is the 🐐! It runs in the name 🤷🏾‍♂️🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣👑

— LeBron James (@KingJames) June 11, 2021

“Even the NBA players who are a target most of the time, they find the humor in it because he’s not punching down at them,” said Michael Starrbury, a friend and co-creator of the show loosely based on Johnson’s own college basketball career, “Legends of Chamberlain Heights.”

“He’s poking fun at the situation, and people can recognize it’s all good-natured.”

Starrbury is also writing an upcoming Ava Duvernay and Colin Kaepernick-produced Netflix series based on the life of Kaepernick, “Colin in Black and White,” where Johnson is also working as a writer and producer.

On this particular Sunday afternoon, Johnson spends his day watching the playoffs in the spare bedroom of the home he shares with his wife and two kids, who are playing together on the other side of the house, aided by his mother, who came by the house to hang out and help babysit.

Johnson’s wearing a custom shirt that features Caruso dunking on Michael Jordan, two days after wearing a freshly created shirt that enshrined James’ decisive, contested three-pointer over Steph Curry in the first-ever play-in tournament for the NBA playoffs.

“Paw Patrol” stuffed animals are a featured element of the room’s decor, which features a couch and a bed, with Johnson’s bench chair from his UCLA days, featuring his name and number (54) surrounding the television.

“People are always like, ‘Oh, you got a team or 50 people working for you,’ but it’s almost always just me, my wife and kids at the house, kids running around screaming,” Johnson said.

Johnson almost never tweets from his laptop and doesn’t have hard drives stuffed full of movie clips or memes ready for repurposing. He just knows where to look and has the skill to cut a quick clip in a hurry.

And when something happens, usually around the world of the NBA but he can stretch to other sports and pop culture as necessary, Johnson’s developed a reputation as connecting one to the other, unintentionally wielding a heavy influence on the way people talk online along the way. He’s just trying to make people laugh, something he’s loved to do his entire life.

“He has the right GIF, movie scene, screenshot of pop culture to tell the story of what is going on, and he does it in the most organic and straight-up funniest way possible. A lot of brands are like, ‘We want our social accounts to look like they’re run by a human’ and it’s like, ‘No, they want their social accounts run like it’s Josiah Johnson running their accounts,” said C.J. Toledano, a friend of Johnson who was head writer and creative director of House of Highlights and recently founded the sports creative studio, Follow Through. “He’s the peak. The pinnacle. The pioneer and, I think, the best in the game.”

He’s still a one-man band who spends, by his estimation, around 10 percent of his time focused on the thing people know him from most often: Twitter.

Many of his 170,000 followers (and counting) might see his avatar, a slack-jawed photo of Johnson as a toddler on the phone and think of him as just a Twitter account.

But he’s done plenty more. And he’s only just begun.

Johnson grew up on movie sets, basketball courts and inside locker rooms. Such is life as the son of an NBA veteran and five-time All-Star who went on to be one of the pioneers of athletes transitioning into acting and show business when their careers were complete.

After basketball, Marques Johnson racked up a host of television and movie credits, most notably as Raymond in the 1992 film, “White Men Can’t Jump.”

It was a natural move. Marques was a native of Los Angeles who graduated from Crenshaw High and UCLA before spending most of the second half of his career in Los Angeles with the Clippers. His teammate, Norm Nixon, married Debbie Allen, and the two families became friends. Josiah’s mother, Jocelyn Johnson, was a frequent extra on the classic NBC sitcom “A Different World,” which meant frequent trips to the set for Josiah.

“You’d be at those tapings and (Debbie) is the voice of God in the control room, giving all the orders and direction and that sh*t just seemed normal to me,” Johnson said.

Across the rest of Hollywood, it was anything but.

As a kid, Josiah would wear costumes and elaborate outfits around the house, playing characters and trying to make his siblings and parents laugh.

“He was in a world all his own all the time,” Marques Johnson said. “When you’d try to enter his world, he wouldn’t be mad or pissed at you, but he wouldn’t allow you in completely. He might acknowledge your presence, but if you tried to play along he wasn’t having it. It was, ‘OK, Dad, that was nice, but I’m doing my own thing.’ His imagination was boundless.”

As a student at what was then University Elementary School in Westwood, he’d spend part of his time on art and part of it on basketball, playing and hovering around nearby pickup games on UCLA’s campus that became a mainstay for NBA talents in the offseason, as well as college players. Eventually, Johnson got to play in them, once going toe-to-toe with Kevin Garnett.

At UES, he teamed up with a few classmates such as Jason Schwartzman and children of Hollywood fixtures like Jeffrey Katzenberg and John Lithgow and shot a detective show at Talia Shire’s Bel Air home called “One Man, One Reality.”

“For kids that age, it was way advanced,” Marques Johnson said.

Steven Spielberg’s children were among his classmates at UES, now known as UCLA Lab School, and he later moved to Crossroads School, a K-12 academy that counts Kate Hudson, Jack Black, Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jonah Hill and Michael Bay as alums.

If Marques had scripts to read or auditions to prepare for, they’d read together, giving Josiah a taste of what it was like to try to make it in Hollywood. Marques would tell his son the background of his character and their motivation, and he’d lean into it.

“He was better than a lot of the casting directors I worked with,” Marques said with a laugh.

The family coined a nickname for him: Dewey Centavo, because he always had his own two cents to add to any conversation or topic.

When they lived in Italy for almost a year at the end of Marques’ basketball career, his sons teamed up for a rap video summarizing what they learned on a family trip to the ruins of Aquileia.

Later in life, his younger brother Moriah was prominently featured on the BET show, “Baldwin Hills.”

Mixing movies, television, art and music was a way of life in the Johnson household.

“I always say it was like he’d lived before. He was so advanced for his age all the time and he was like a little wise, old man,” Jocelyn Johnson said.

Josiah loved basketball and when he wasn’t playing, he was still around it, serving as ball boy for the 1995 UCLA team that won a national title.

And he had a front-row seat for the dark side of basketball as one of his earliest memories in life.

On May 16, 1987, then 1-year-old Marques Johnson Jr. drowned after crawling out a cracked door and falling in the family pool. More than 30 years later, he shakes his head thinking about his father emerging from the water, his Adidas sweatsuit soaking wet as he tried to revive his son beside the pool.

“We still think about it every day,” Josiah Johnson said. “Seeing somebody be so helpless and the look on his face is something I’ll never forget, not being able to make it better and make it right.”

Josiah’s father had suffered a career-threatening neck injury months earlier and was in a neck brace, mulling a risky surgery that could repair the injury but could also result in permanent paralysis.

In the days after the tragedy as the family grieved, Marques Sr. got a call from then-Clippers owner Donald Sterling. It wasn’t for condolences. It was an expletive-filled call filled with threats of legal action if Johnson didn’t undergo the controversial surgery.

Johnson grew up a Clippers fan, rooting for his dad, but shed his fandom later in life to follow LeBron.

“It’s like, ‘Do you know the sh*t that I’ve been through with this f—in’ team and the way they tried to take my dad’s dignity and dehumanize him?’” Josiah Johnson said.

It opened his eyes to the realities of professional sports, and how little franchises cared about players as people, especially if they weren’t currently making them money or winning them games.

After college, he started a pro-players-style site as a writing outlet called Jersey Chaser, and his fandom’s never been limited to a team. He was going to support players, not teams, an ethos that’s become part of his online identity as his fandom shifted from the Cavs to the Heat, back to the Cavs and now with the Lakers, the other team in Los Angeles.

“It was always just such a bullsh*t world to me and I realized at an early age there’s no such thing as loyalty in sports,” Johnson said. “I think a lot of fans bond with teams, but we’ve seen owners can be pieces of sh*t and don’t have fans’ best interest at heart and fans have this blind allegiance to franchises that frankly don’t give a f— about them.”

Johnson grew into a basketball star and in high school, enrolled at his father’s alma mater in Crenshaw but eventually transferred to Montclair Prep.

“He was bored,” Jocelyn Johnson said. “We realized he wasn’t being challenged academically.”

By the time he got to college, he had more than 30 hours of college credit and a 4.3 GPA. He also happened to be 6-foot-8.

“I’m walking around like, pretending to be a cool guy when really I was just a big ass nerd,” Johnson said.

He was in demand from smaller schools and had a scholarship offer from UC Santa Barbara but went on a visit to UCLA. Marques Johnson figured a walk-on spot might be available, but coach Steve Lavin eventually brought him on campus for an official visit.

“I told him, ‘See the school, have a good time but don’t commit. We’ll talk about it when you get home,’” Marques Johnson said.

A few hours into the visit, Josiah called his dad with some news from inside UCLA’s locker room. He’d committed. Lavin liked his potential and for Josiah, it was an opportunity to live out a family legacy. Plus, he wanted to stay close to home to be around his brothers.

By his senior season, he grew into a role player and his early years sitting on the bench alongside teammate Quinn Hawking became the inspiration for “Legends of Chamberlain Heights.”

“Often, I’d find him in his room just writing, which seemed so foreign to me,” said Gene Barnes, a friend, roommate and teammate with the Bruins. “He’d be writing scripts or funny scenarios.”

In their house, “Coming to America” and “White Men Can’t Jump” were staples, but he didn’t learn Johnson’s father was featured in the latter until years after they’d met.

“Any situation that might not be ideal, Jo always brought a lighter side to it, poked fun,” Barnes said. “Nonstop humor.”

After college, Johnson found a job at Fox Sports in Los Angeles, working as a production assistant. There, he’d cut highlights to use in evening highlight shows. The more experience he got, the faster he could cut clips.

For over his first year, he didn’t take a sick day.

Eventually, he took a job at NFL Network cutting news conferences and in his spare time, started writing “Legends of Chamberlain Heights.”

He wanted something more in line with what he grew up watching, like “Martin,” “In Living Color,” “A Different World” or “The Cosby Show.”

So he started writing the animated show about three benchwarmers on a high school basketball team who are, as the title suggests, legends in their own mind.

For most of his career, Johnson has sent what he wrote to his father for notes, to get his take or some pointers on how it could improve. They also co-wrote a series called “Golden Ghetto” based on the story of the gentrification of a neighborhood in Windsor Hills, where Marques grew up, and they are in the process of pitching it to multiple production companies.

“He’s a real pro. He understands all the techniques and tricks, emotional manipulation, schematics and structure of a scene,” Marques Johnson said. “He’s really, really good at that.”

Marques asked for more input from his son on a project of his own, a screenplay that fleshed out the story of the character he played in “White Men Can’t Jump.”

Josiah eventually came on as a segment producer on “Jim Rome on Showtime” and over the course of his four seasons, was promoted to producer, while still working part-time at the NFL Network in graphics and production.

Quietly, he kept working on his show until it became official: Comedy Central wanted it. In 2013, he was 31 and had sold his first TV show. Two years later, it was officially greenlit. He also brought his brother Joshua aboard as a punch-up writer to make sure jokes would land for his younger target audience.

“He’d show me stuff and I just remember being on the floor crying laughing because there were so many nods to our experience in college together, riding the pine and some of the conversations we’d have,” Barnes said.

He’d begun work on it in 2009, and his biggest effort had paid off.

“We’re like, ‘Oh, everything we do is gonna be like that,’” Johnson said. “We quickly found out that was extremely rare.”

It meant long days of 12-18 hours, too. Like his tweets, it began picking up athletes as fans, like Kawhi Leonard.

Starrbury came aboard as a co-creator, and for two seasons, Johnson was living his dream. Every day, he’d write, produce, voice and anything else that needed to be done for the show.

And then it was canceled.

In 2014, between the show being greenlit and premiering, he began dating Erinn Noeth, a radiologist who had also been a swimmer at UCLA. She saw the show at its peak and attended table reads. He’d practice voices with her and run jokes by her. She saw her future husband at what felt like the start of an exploding career.

Then, it felt like he was starting back at zero.

“’Legends’ was his baby. ‘Legends’ was his creation. It was hard. Hollywood is a tough game,” Noeth said. “I’ve seen some of the lower points of his career and now this current rise, which is just amazing. It was hard for him at the time to figure out what he wanted to do next. He’s funny on Twitter and all that, but he’s this brilliant writer, producer and he knows sports and he’d done a lot of things. But even at his lowest point, he was still writing and honing his craft, meeting with people and working to where he is now. He was always grinding, even when he was let down. He always had his sights on what was next.”

That work ethic is the same thing that helped him take up running during the pandemic and shed 60 pounds.

But for almost a year after “Legends” was canceled, jobs were few and far between. He was burnt out doing sports television. But he saw he could succeed on social media. He’d grown his show’s Twitter account from nothing to almost 70,000 followers in just over a year.

“It made me realize this was the future,” Johnson said.

So he started tweeting more from his own account he’d created in the middle of making the show.

“I knew what social media would do to me if I got too immersed in it and before that, I didn’t see any monetized value to it,” Johnson said. “I ended up learning social that way.”

Later, he tried to sell a company on letting him take over a vision of its social media. The company didn’t bite.

“I try to pitch and sell people sh*t and maybe I’m just bad at it. Because most times, they can’t see the vision so I just gotta end up doing it,” Johnson said. “Anytime you work at a company, it’s like, ‘You gotta do it this way. You can’t say that. You gotta be genuine. Except don’t be genuine,’” Johnson said.

So he did it his way and built his own platform. Later, he took a job as lead producer on an internet-based show on Yahoo! starring Martellus Bennett called “Mostly Football.”

Eventually, he landed jobs in more traditional television. Today, he’s working on multiple projects. He’s a writer/producer on Ava Duvernay’s upcoming Colin Kaepernick miniseries as well as “Cherish The Day,” another Duvernay show on OWN, Oprah Winfrey’s TV network.

Johnson’s Doncic tweet had Duvernay laughing hard enough to offer a shoutout.

Yes, Josiah is the meme king. Yes, he is also an @ARRAYNow writer on two of my shows. Yes, I am simultaneously laughing and doing this pretty much daily…. pic.twitter.com/FmWm7h826k

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) June 6, 2021

One especially surreal moment for Johnson? Hearing Duvernay and Oprah were trading his memes and laughing at his work.

“Part of what makes him special is he’s been a one-man band at this thing,” Toledano said. “He’s grabbing numbers that all companies want, but he’s doing it himself. He’s showing one person can do this. And that’s incredible, but I’ve seen companies try it with one person and they can’t recreate the magic he has on his account.”

He knew what he could do and did it. Now, he’s in demand and built his platform into real clout. He finds himself in rarified air as one of the most influential voices in the space and someone in demand. He’s fielded interest from a variety of media companies for a variety of projects, but for now, he’s stayed independent with his hands all over TV and the internet.

“In the last year or two, we’re seeing all the fruits of his labor come to fruition,” Toledano said.

About half of his income now is from television writing while the other half comes from monetizing his feed in a variety of ways. Most notably, that’s a show on Wave.tv with Zach Schwartz, a former employee at The Ringer whom Johnson knew previously and worked with on “Mostly Football.” Together, they go live after games for a free-flowing conversation about the NBA. Mostly.

On the show after the Clippers-Mavs Game 7, Johnson complimented Trae Young’s performance in the playoffs, but also compared him to Big Ern McCracken, the follicularly challenged protagonist of the movie “Kingpin” and blamed Kevin Durant’s move to Golden State for ruining LeBron’s legacy.

What about Blake Griffin’s Brooklyn resurgence after signing up on “The Harden Plan” and throwing in the towel in Detroit?

“Give us, us free, as they said in Amistad,” Johnson says into the camera with a smile.

He also does some on-camera work for Turner Sports, a show in an expensive studio with a paid crew in Burbank (and sometimes Atlanta) that can attract around a million viewers a broadcast. Meanwhile, his Wave.tv show is shot at Johnson’s and Schwartz’s homes with remote producers, laptop webcams and ring lights, and garners around 200,000 viewers.

“If we’d pitched this show to networks, they’d have said no,” Johnson said.

So like he’s done on social media, they created something on their own and built a platform that’s growing all the time.

For the entirety of the broadcast, he can hardly stop smiling. On this particular Sunday, his wife is working, so she claims the office where he usually shoots. He’s relegated to the kitchen, setting up his laptop atop a pair of kids’ shoeboxes with an all-white podcasting mic, headphones and a big glass of water off-screen.

“His brain works in such a way that — being good on social isn’t knowing what’s trending. It’s knowing where what’s trending is going. And he has such a gift for that,” Schwartz said. “He just has such an ability to blend what’s going on in pop culture and mix it with iconic touchpoints in his sketches, his memes. His brain just has wonderful retention of what’s funny from culture, relevant now and he has an ability to connect the two.”

Now, Johnson can do it without interference and on a platform he built for himself, owns and can use as he wishes. His current aim, with DMs open, is to point other Black creatives to the business avenues and strategies he learned so they can turn their own smarts and content into money and a career instead of solely free traffic and engagement for social media companies. He offers advice when he can, and when he sees talent and has opportunities to hire it, he’ll do it.

He half-jokingly compares it to the Underground Railroad, but it’s the same ethos that’s marked different stages of his life, like buying his younger brother Joshua some white Jordan 11 lows when Josiah was barely out of college, or living at the hospital for a week with his mom when he was 15, staying up and playing Starfox 64 with 7-year-old Joshua while he fought leukemia. Or inviting Starrbury, a diehard Bucks fan and Milwaukee native, to be a guest at his dad’s jersey retirement ceremony.

“I think there’s such a void for Black content created by Black people that have a vested interest in the company and are in executive roles and decision-making roles. If I would have just done it without the following that I have, nobody would give a f—, but now that I’ve shown I can get 250 million impressions in a month, it’s like, ‘Oh sh*t. You could probably do this at a high level.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah and I know the other people who can do it too. And I know how to train them to do it.’”

He grew up on Black shows and movies, and combined his brain’s unique recall, his feel for comedy and basketball knowhow, and has carved out a niche that’s a perfect encapsulation of the road that brought him to where he is now. And while he racks up retweets, he can’t help but relish in the success others couldn’t see when he painted the vision. Instead, they watch.

“I take pride in, ‘Oh, a big event’s going on? I’m gonna f—in’ smack your whole team. I know you have like 15 people working, three graphic designers, all this high-level sh*t, whatever.’ But at the end of the day, social is basic. It’s simple. It’s whatever the thing is. It doesn’t need to be highly produced,” Johnson said.

Did it make him laugh? That’s always Johnson’s starting point.

“It’s crazy. He’s so funny and he has a really simple idea of what comedy is, but that simple idea is hard to execute or everyone would be doing it,” Starrbury said. “But he nails it because he’s such a smart guy.”

It’s what earned him LeBron’s approval, from one king to another.

“This is really just the beginning,” Toledano said. “Josiah wants to make movies and TV or end up teaching this stuff, and in 10 years, people are going to be clipping out scenes from his work for their own memes and GIFs.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic. Photos: David Ubben / The Athletic)