The Superstars of Tourette’s TikTok
Halfway through our conversation, Glen Cooney calls me a four-letter word often cited as the most offensive in the English language. But that’s okay. He doesn’t mean it.
Cooney has Tourette’s syndrome, which causes tics, twitches, and—in some people—a symptom called coprolalia, which the Tourette Association of America characterizes as “the involuntary outburst of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks.” Living with the disorder is tiring, because of both the tics themselves and the effort of trying to repress them. Coprolalia adds to the burden. Cooney, a 42-year-old who runs a window-cleaning business on the British island of Guernsey, tells me that he recently approached a woman on a mobility scooter and shouted in her face that she was lazy. Soon after that, when he saw nuns in the grocery store where his wife works, he shouted “Nuns on the run!” before observing out loud that “all priests are pedophiles.” He also tells me that he has just come back from a store, where he reflexively made praying hands at a Chinese woman and said “Konichiwa.” He sighs. “I know that’s Japanese, but my brain doesn’t know that.”
On Twitter, such behavior would get Cooney canceled a dozen times a day, but on TikTok, it has made him a star. He has 3.4 million followers on the video app, as well as a solid income from that have sprung, irrepressibly, from his subconscious and onto his TikTok feed. (When we talk over Zoom, he is wearing a sweatshirt that reads .) The money he makes from product sales, and from , is not enough to give up his day job. But he says that it could be, if
